Chapter 2

Gradually the sun approached and dipped below the blue line of extended plain which lay between the city and the sea; the long shadows of afternoon began to blend into the one deeper shade of evening; the groups of distant buildings became more and more indistinct; the arches of the Colosseum softly faded away, leaving but a broad mass of unbroken wall; upon the Palatine Hill the great house of the Cæsars shone less and less gloriously as the sky darkened behind the pile of decorated roofs; here and there a light gleamed from some distant quarter; here and there stars began to glisten in the sky.

Then the concourse of people, who had waited so long and patiently, began to break apart. The pageant was not yet entirely over, for fresh battalions of soldiers still marched past at rapid pace, tuning their steady tramp to the cadence of their songs of triumph. But the great feature of the occasion--the conqueror himself--had ridden by; and what yet remained was but a faint recapitulation of the glories which had gone before. Therefore the patricians retired from their balconies, the horsemen abandoned their stations and plunged down the many streets which led out from the Forum, and the crowd of slaves and menial citizens, already rendered so indistinct in the fading light as to resemble one writhing, struggling monster rather than separate beings, began to stretch out its long arms into the narrow lanes and byways, and so gradually to melt away.

Withdrawing from the front balcony of the Vanno palace, where, shielded from the sun, she had sat and watched the procession pass by, Ænone, the young and fair wife of the conqueror, now sought rest and retirement in an inner apartment. Thither one of her women had preceded her, and had drawn forward a cushioned lounge, had beaten up the silken pillows, had placed a table near at hand, with a light repast spread upon it, had trimmed and filled with fresh olive oil the large bronze lamp which swung from the ceiling, and now stood by awaiting further orders.

Throwing herself upon the lounge, Ænone covered her face with her hands. What unbidden thought was it that came creeping into her heart to trouble her? Why was it that something of the bright joyousness of spirit with which she looked forward to that day had vanished? Surely nothing had occurred which of itself could bring to her either sorrow or repining. All things had happened as she had anticipated. She had seen her honored lord pass by with the myrtle wreath upon his brow, his most worthy officers at his side, and his bravest guards around him. She had seen that he was strong and without wound, as he had departed from her. She had heard the shouts of applause which had welcomed his approach as though he were a god; and, with her heart generously and unselfishly alive only to his honor, and unable to realize that all this frantic joy and adulation were not the passion of the nation's life, but were merely one single, careless throb of its fevered pulse, she had rejoiced with him, believing that he had indeed done what had made him the greatest of all living men. And, better than all, amid this scene of triumph, he had not seemed unmindful of her, for he had looked up and waved to her a salute, which the responsive crowd had joined in and carried along with redoubled acclamations, and he had sent to her his most trusty slave with a loving message. What, then, could she ask more?

Nothing that she could name, or that if she named, to others, would have seemed a reasonable desire. And yet at her heart there was a certain dim, indistinct foreboding of evil, which she could not entirely repress. Was it that, in his glance, as he rode by and beheld her awaiting him, there was less of longing love than of gratified pride? Or did that flush upon his bronzed face indicate too surely his enjoyment of this pageant for its own sake rather than for the pleasure which he might have supposed that she would derive from it? Was it from forgetfulness of her that, after he had ridden past, he did not again look back to wave one more recognition, but rather seemed to gaze eagerly forward to where the assembled senators stood ready to greet him? Or, on the contrary, were all these merely vague and empty imaginings arising from the exhaustion and wearisomeness of long, impatient waiting?

At length, raising her head, she saw her attendant bondwoman standing at the distance of a few paces, with her hands crossed upon her breast. The steady tramp of marching troops outside had ceased, for the last battalion had passed; and now the only sound was the silver bubbling and plashing of a little fountain that adorned the courtyard upon which the window of the apartment looked out.

'The pageant is over now,' said Ænone, 'and he will soon be here. Let me know as soon as my lord returns.'

The woman bowed her head in silence; and then, feeling that nothing more was wanted of her, slowly turned to depart. As she did so, a new comer entered the room--a male slave of Gallic birth, who, by reason of his lofty stature as well as wonderful strength, had been promoted from the lowest order of servitude to become Sergius Vanno's armor bearer and chief attendant. In that capacity he had fought through the late campaign, and had now returned, bearing among his fellows his own share of honor for successful and daring exploits. He had been released from personal attendance only a few moments before, and was now carrying back his master's sword and buckler, to hang them up in their accustomed place, and himself subside into well-earned idleness. Being the first time, for many months, that he had seen his mistress, he muttered some rough ejaculations expressive of servile devotion, and then stood in lazy attitude awaiting her permission to speak further.

'Your master, Drumo?'

'Will not return to-night,' the man responded. 'The emperor demands his presence.'

'And that will detain him--'

'He knows not how long. But immediately after that there is to be a brave feast at the house of the poet Emilius, and it will doubtless be morning before they separate.'

'He bade you tell me this?'

The giant nodded.

'It is well. That is all; you can go. You may both go, for I would be alone.'

The armor bearer turned upon his heel and strode away, the sword and buckler, together with his own rougher trappings, rattling at his back as he passed down the hall; and behind him slowly crept away the bondwoman. And Ænone, once more leaning back upon the lounge, gave herself up to sombre reflection.

It was of course no more than proper, she mused, that her lord should obey the behests of the emperor and wait upon him. Perhaps new honors would then be showered down; and, at the least, it was no light privilege to stand in the presence of the ruler of the world, and there give personal narration of his exploits. But when that interview was over, what need to join the revels of another household, instead of hurrying back to place his newly won garlands at her feet?

She pondered upon the dubious reputation which attached to the house of the poet Emilius, and recalled the terrible stories which, from time to time, she had heard regarding it. What might be the realities of the scenes there enacted, none could truly tell, except the few most intimate frequenters of the place; but report gave no flattering description of them. Even among the Roman ladies with whom she was associated, and whose information was confined to such stray bits of gossip as they had picked up from slaves and menials, and who, standing in unconscious awe of her simple purity of heart, often forebore to speak with her as freely and unguardedly as with each other, she had occasionally heard such startling tales of the wild dissipations there enacted, as surpassed conception, and left her horrified senses no calm refuge except in unbelief. The gorgeous feasts, the night-long libations, the social intimacy with dancing girls and gladiators, the mockery of all that was pure and holy, the derisive insults to the gods themselves--these were practices which the public voice connected with the house of Emilius, not as occasional outbreaks of wild frivolity, but as the fixed habits of his daily life. And if these things were true, what claim of pride or policy could such a place advance to distract her lord from the allegiance due to his own home alone?

But possibly these things might not be true. She reflected that the poet was wealthy; and as long as the world continues to be envious, riches will seldom fail to bring false report upon their possessor. He was a man of genius, also; and all such can scarcely fail to find rivals who will turn satirists and attack them in their homes and daily life. Certainly, it is not difficult for slander to magnify the genial gatherings of kindred spirits into scenes of wild debauchery. And it was also true, that if mere outside appearance is of any value as an index of what is hidden, the slight figure, the pale and almost girlish face, and the winning and courteous demeanor of the poet were far from indicating a man of low and debasing inclinations. Moreover, his writings as surely spoke the contrary; and as she thus reasoned, Ænone lifted from its case a vellum roll with which Emilius himself had presented her, containing many of his poems, exquisitely engrossed. These poems treated not upon the pleasures of wine and love--those fruitful and ever-varying subjects of the Horatian school. Instead of this, they pursued, in deep-sounding and majestically rolling dactyls, the less favorite and trodden track of Socrates and Plato, and discoursed upon temperance and honor--upon the satisfaction derived from a well-spent life, and the delights attending a peaceful death--upon the immateriality of the soul, and the reward bestowed by the gods upon those who have honored them by leading a virtuous career. As Ænone slowly turned over leaf after leaf of the parchment roll, she felt her heart perplexed within her. She could scarcely believe that none of those tales of reckless dissipation were true, for she remembered that some of them had reached her ear attended by evidence so circumstantial that it was impossible to reject them; but, if true, how account for these grand maxims of lofty morality? What object could their author have in thus uselessly playing the hypocrite, when amatory and bacchanalian choruses would not only have been more consonant with his own feelings, but doubtless more acceptable to the world? She had not yet learned what it often takes the wisest man a lifetime to discover--that every inconsistency of conduct is not hypocrisy, but that it is one of the most common idiosyncrasies of the mind to write and believe one thing, and as self-approvingly to feel and act the reverse.

With a sigh she closed the volume, and restored it to its place within the case. Why ponder upon such things as these? The real character of the poet Emilius was, after all, a matter of but little consequence to her. Whether the meeting at his house was a wild, reckless orgy, or a mere intellectual gathering of literary genius, it was none the less certain that her lord was tarrying there, away from her side. But perhaps, indeed, even this was a duty which he owed to his fame and station; and her face brightened up with new hope as the suggestion flashed upon her. It might be that at this feast there would be present some poet of lofty epic powers, or historian of wondrous descriptive talent, ranking as the brightest star of Roman literature; and either of these, if properly conciliated, would doubtless celebrate her lord's exploits so grandly that in future ages his campaign would shine with far greater lustre than if simply committed to parchment in the dry detail of unadorned fact, and so filed away in the national archives. It was most fitting, therefore, that he should not permit his impatient love for her to allow him to neglect the opportunity of cultivating, by a wise and condescending courtesy, the world-renowned talents of these men, and thereby redoubling the resplendence of his own bright fame.

Easily satisfying her mind with this pleasing reasoning, she retired for the night into the innermost apartment--a retreat adorned with every luxury which could gratify pride and administer to a cultivated taste. The floor was covered with tesselated marbles of different shades and arranged in ingenious and novel patterns. The ceiling was resplendent with allegorical frescoes by the most celebrated masters of the day. There were glowing paintings upon the walls, rich tapestries in the windows, embroidered hangings upon the bed. Beside the tables stood bronze figures holding forth lamps ready trimmed and lighted; fresh flowers had been placed in their allotted vases, and weighed down the air with perfume; and in a deep recess stood the bath ready filled, and scented with carefully plucked rose leaves floating upon the water. But all this display of magnificent luxury and elaborate taste, if regarded by her at all, now seemed to affect her with weariness rather than with pleasure.

Why, as she lay down upon her couch, and prepared to yield herself up to pleasant slumber, did her thoughts wander back to the time when poverty instead of luxury had been her lot? Why did those olden memories of the past so strongly haunt her? They were, perhaps, never entirely absent from her heart; but now they thronged about her with a force that would not bear repression. Perhaps it was that the very magnificence and pomp of power of which she was now the centre, recalled the memory of the distant past, by virtue of strong contrast alone; perhaps that the unsatisfied longing and vague foreboding of her soul necessarily impressed upon her the consciousness that wealth and honor alone cannot give perfect happiness, and thereby naturally led her thoughts back to the time when she had found true content in poverty and loneliness. However that might be, now, as she closed her eyes and shut out the view of the costly adornments around her, more vividly than ever before were pictured before her mind the scenes of her childhood: her father's cottage on the outskirts of Ostia--the olive grove upon the slope behind--the roadside well, where the villagers would sometimes gather about some invalided soldier from the German army, and listen to his tales of the last campaign--and in front, the bay, sparkling in the bright glare of the sun and laden with the corn-freighted ships of Alexandria.

And there, too, was the old wave-worn rock--the scene of her life's only romance--where, stealing out from her father's cabin at the evening hour, and seating herself so close to the waterline that the spray of the tideless sea would dash up and bathe her naked feet, she would wait in all innocence for the coming of the young sailor from Samos. How rapidly those hours used to pass! How pleadingly, on the last evening, he had knelt beside her, with his arm resting upon her knee, and there, gazing up into her face, had asked her for one long tress of hair! How foolish she had been to give it to him; and how earnestly he had vowed that he would come back some day, no longer poor and forlorn, but in his own two-masted vessel, with full banks of oars, manned by the slaves whom he would capture, and would then bear her away unto his own home! And how, like a silly girl, she had believed him, as though wandering sailor boys ever did come back to seek the loving hearts which had trusted them! And so the year had passed away, and, as she might well have known from the first, he had not returned. Nor was it to her regret; for but a little afterward the youthful patrician, already flushed with budding honors, had chanced to meet her; had loved her with a generous passion, lifting him above all sordid calculation about wealth or social differences, and had taught her in turn to bestow upon him an affection more true and absorbing than she had yet believed her heart was able to contain. And so her first romantic dream had ended, as all such childish dreams are apt to end. Let it go. Her heart had found its true bourne; she could well look back upon the past without regret, and smile at the youthful fancies connected with it.

One prayer to the gods--a further special invocation to her favorite goddess, who, at the foot of the couch, stretched forth marble arms lovingly toward her--and then the silver tinkling of the little courtyard fountain lulled her softly to sleep.

CARL FRIEDRICH NEUMANN, THE GERMAN HISTORIAN OF OUR COUNTRY.

The first volume of a history of the United States by Carl Friedrich Neumann, of Berlin,[2] has just been announced as the first history of our country ever written originally in the German language. The appearance of such a work at this juncture in our national existence, is a noteworthy event, and the man who takes so unique an interest in our affairs should be introduced to our people. Having known him personally and intimately for many years, I shall attempt such sketch, making much of it anecdotal, for which purpose material is not wanting.

Dr. Neumann, born near Bamberg, in the kingdom of Bavaria, of Jewish parents, is now about sixty-five years of age, was educated at Heidelberg, passed over to the Protestant church at Munich, afterward attended lectures at Göttingen, and soon after became rector of the gymnasium at Speyer, but was dismissed from this place on account of the freedom with which he expressed himself on some religious topics in his historical teachings. He gave private lessons for a time in Munich, and then went to learn in a Benedictine monastery in Venice the Armenian language. This was in 1827. In 1829 he studied the Chinese language in Paris, went over to London, and sailed thence to visit India and China. He collected for himself about ten thousand volumes of Chinese works, embracing every department of the literature of this language, and bought for the Royal Library at Berlin two thousand four hundred volumes. Such collections had been till then unknown in Europe, and hence this was quite an event. Returning in 1831 from India, he made a present of all his Chinese books to the Royal Library at Munich, and was appointed conservator of this collection, and professor of Chinese and Armenian in the university of that capital.

Of Dr. Neumann's attainments in Oriental literature I know only what fame says, nor does it concern us much in this sketch. I once, however, sat with him in a retiring room of the Munich Museum (a great reading room), when Baron Tautphoeus, whose accomplished wife is so well known in this country as authoress of the 'Initials' and 'Quits,' entered, and asked if we had seen the notice of Dr. Neumann in the last number of the London _Times_. The doctor had read it; I had not, but immediately did so. It made him the equal of the greatest orientalists of the past and present ages, comparing him particularly with Klaproth. The _Times_, it is true, had a motive for this notice, as always, both in its praises and its lampoons. It had found views of Dr. Neumann on British India which it desired to commend, but even in our view this would not cancel the eulogy. His authorship in connection with Chinese and Armenian philosophy and history is very considerable, and outside of this field he won, in 1847, a prize offered by the French Institute for the best work on the 'Historical Development of the Peoples of Southern Russia.'

What was to be done in the university in Chinese and Armenian, he of course did; but his lectures took a much wider range, embracing general history and ethnography. His powers of elocution were of a high order, and crowds of students were drawn to his lecture room. That freedom of utterance which cost him the rectorship at Speyer, was like Dr. Watts's or Pope's instinct for making rhymes--it was his nature, and could not be whipped out of him; and it was equally natural that it should assume the form of wit and humor.

There are not a few anecdotes in the popular mouth illustrating this trait. He seems to have had no great liking to that race of men called kings, and it is said that he once alluded to them, in a lecture, in the not very respectful remark that 'they were numbered, like the hacks in our streets.' The reader's apprehension of the point of another anecdote, in which Dr. Neumann appears in an attitude not very respectful to his own sovereign, Louis II of Bavaria, will depend upon his knowing something of the situation and history of the university buildings in Munich. The king, among the many things he did for the architectural adorning of the city, built a street to be called by his name. It is all outside of the old wall, and its outer end is closed by a triumphal arch. Next to this, and outside of the city as it _then_ was, the king purchased ground, perhaps because it was cheap, and built the present university edifice. As much farther out of the then city proper lies the miserable little town of Schwabing. Professors and students disliked to be taken so far from their lodgings and their beerhouses, and the old university had been quite within the city. When the removal took place, Dr. Neumann sketched the history of the institution in a lecture, referring to its original establishment at Ingolstadt, its removal thence to Landschut, and thence to Munich, and then added, that _'his Majesty King Louis II had now been pleased to remove it to Schwabing_.' We can imagine the sensation which such a sally would produce among students already stirred up for its appreciation, by having to walk from a half mile to a mile from those depots of beer barrels from which so many of them sucked their sluggish life and inspiration. But such jokes were not treason, or contempt of majesty, or anything else against law.

It should be added in this connection, for Dr. Neumann's benefit, that these stories, and many of the kind, are floating around, and are just like him, but I have never had any confirmation of them from him, and in all our intercourse, which was frequent and intimate for six years, while he spoke much and freely in favor of democratical and against monarchical institutions, I never found him indulging in coarse and clamorous denunciations of his king or Government.

When the great revolutionary movement of 1848 broke upon the land, the sovereigns of Germany saw and accepted their condition. The popular mind was so penetrated by this unrest, and the revolutionary leaders were so substantial in character, that resistance was folly, and the monarchs yielded, waiting the time when some change would enable them to divide the revolutionists and turn them against each other. They allowed and even encouraged the formation at Frankfort of a provisional Parliament, called the Fore-Parliament, which looked toward a permanent central Government at that place for united Germany. Of this body Dr. Neumann was a member. It was a fine field for the display of his free and liberal instincts, and we cannot conceive of his passing through its debates without making large drafts upon his exhaustless fund of humor and sarcasm. It would be strange, indeed, if he could witness the dawn of that freedom which he loved without showing signs of exultation, accompanied with occasional taunts at the regime which was passing away and seemed already beyond recovery.

But, although a regular Parliament followed--although a quasi emperor was elected in the person of the Archduke John of Austria, and his way, as he proceeded to Frankfort, was a perfect triumphal procession--although he selected his ministers, set them to work, and Parliament was progressing with its constitution, and this continued for almost a year, still, that which the shrewd ministers of some of the sovereigns had doubtless foreseen and waited for, came. Radicals outran their wiser and more rational brethren, and took up arms. They would demolish at once those sovereignties which would have died by the slow action of time, had the central Government been fully established and wisely administered. But this new Government rather deliberated than acted. That which more than all else arouses the German mind--the Schleswig-Holstein question, identified as it is with the great question of the unity of the Teutonic race--was not taken up by the Government at Frankfort, but by that at Berlin. In the mean time the several Governments of Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria had gained the mastery over their own domestic revolutions, so that they could act more freely. Austria called home its archduke and its members in the Frankfort Parliament, and finally the whole movement subsided into the old order of things.

The various Governments were now in a position in which they could punish those disturbers of their peace who had endangered their very existence. Of these Dr. Neumann was one, and in 1852 he was notified that his lectures were no longer needed in the university of Munich. It was doubtless thought that he would make some slight formal concessions, and be permitted to continue his active duties, as others had done. But he felt too independent. He had means to live upon. His retiring pension could not be withheld. He could now, moreover, give his individual powers to authorship, without feeling hampered by the thought that he had a Government to please. He has persevered in this course, notwithstanding the express wish of the philosophical faculty for his return to active duty in the university.

He had been occupied with a history of the British empire in India. To this he gave increased attention, and published it some years ago; but the Indian rebellion breaking out soon after its publication, he was led to sketch its history as an appendix. His investigations in the East brought him in contact with the peculiar history of the Japanese empire, and he threw off by the way a brief history of Japan, devoting a chapter to the results of the American expedition thither.

It was while prosecuting his inquiries into the history of Eastern Asia, that he met with such evidences of the commercial enterprise of the United States, and obtained such views of the future of our country, as to conceive the thought of writing its history for the German people, commencing with the war of 1812, the point at which he considered our wonderful growth and expansion to have begun; and long before finishing his history of British India, he was collecting material for this work. He found, however, that he could not begin at the point he had chosen without striking upon roots and rudely severing them, which had struck deeply into the soil of all the earlier periods of our existence. His plan was therefore enlarged.

The breaking out of the rebellion was a sad blow to him--it could not have been more so to an American. It was likely not only to spoil _our_ country, but _his_ history of it. It either cut off or dimmed or confused that prospect of growth and expansion which had been stretched out interminably before him. He read the daily London _Times_--he had for years taken the New York _Herald_, and his reliance upon this sheet had been rather too implicit. Years before the breaking out of the rebellion, I had suggested this, and introduced to him the New York _Times_ and _Evening Post_, one of which he has taken ever since, not, however, without occasional intervals of sighing for his old companion the _Herald_, much as his ancestors, after having left Egypt, sighed for its leeks and onions. Although he coupled the _Herald_ and London _Times_--_par nobile fratrum_--as joint sharers of a favorite epithet of his--_great liars_--he still liked to read them.

Dr. Neumann had been a Democrat in his politics--for he was familiar with our distinctions in this country--but since the outbreak of the rebellion he has scarcely known where to place himself. He had made the personal acquaintance of Buchanan, when that 'old public functionary' was our Minister in London, and felt, as was quite natural, a little vain of this acquaintance when Buchanan became the head of the Government of that unseen land of his most enthusiastic admiration. The man, however, was less than the country, and he could drop him; but he still desired to see him succeeded by a Democrat. We often had little spats, in which I took the ground that such had been the extravagant demands of the South, made through the platforms of that party, that with the strongest predilections for some of its men and its earlier antecedents, I should have felt bound to vote for both Fremont and Lincoln, if I had been in the country. He would generally end the matter by a pleasant and jocular dissent, calling himself a Democrat and me a Republican. But _after the rebellion_, his friends never knew what he was, except that he was for the Union and the putting down of the rebels. No American could have felt in deeper sympathy with our cause. In that land, where a thousand volunteers could not be raised to save a throne, how did his heart swell with just pride when the President called for seventy-five thousand, and afterward in succession for hundreds of thousands, and they came forth at the call! How depressed at instances of want of skill or decision in Government or generals! He nearly lost his patience with young men who were quietly pursuing their studies in Europe, when their country was in peril and its armies needed them; and he quite lost it when he met Americans who sympathized with the rebellion, or even seemed indifferent to their country's fortunes.

There was an American lady in Munich, soon after the rebellion broke out, whose husband had died some years before, while holding a position in the army which entitled her to a pension, for which she had drawn while there. She had heard of Professor Neumann's love for our country and country people, but had no idea of the strictness of his discrimination between the parties--thought that he might feel much like the thousands of Germans who quietly ask us which side we are on--she may, too, have inferred something from his having a brother in Savannah, Georgia. She soon found her mistake; for he informed her, in terms of no doubtful import, that his sympathy did not embrace those of her class; and thus the result of the pleasant visit she had promised herself was little short of being turned out doors.

About the 10th of December, 1861, we had at our house a little company of about thirty persons, and Dr. Neumann, with his wife and two daughters, was among them. An American gentleman, who had been known to his family and ours, had left for Russia two years before, and returned that very day, was one of the company, and we had not yet learned his views of secession. The first thing with Dr. Neumann and his daughters was to know how he stood on this question. They found him a rebel, and in giving him their minds in relation to this matter, one of the daughters expressed to him her wonder that I should allow him to enter my house as they would not allow him in theirs. The stir made in the company by this little brush at arms arrested the attention of all, and gave the Americans their first information as to where our quondam friend stood, as well as set them an example of zeal and enthusiasm in their own cause.

I must close this notice with an incident which lies quite outside of Dr. Neumann's relations to America and Americans. On his retirement from his university labors, he withdrew mainly from the exciting scenes of public life. But in November, 1859, occurred the centennial anniversary of Schiller's birth. Of all the men connected with German popular literature, Schiller is most in the hearts of the people of Germany. The spirit of liberty shown in his 'William Tell'--his exile from his native Wirtemberg for the free expressions used in the first play he ever wrote--his high order of genius as a poet and historian--the subjects he chose, and the way he treated them, and, finally, his social and domestic character, have all combined to endear him to the whole people. This festival was everywhere observed, and with the highest enthusiasm; for although Governments were afraid of its effects, they were still more afraid to refuse permission to hold it. It lasted for several days, on one of which was a great public dinner, with several hundred in attendance, of which Dr. Neumann consented to be one. Champagne flowed freely, and although I did not taste this beverage, and know by experience little of its effects, it was easy to perceive that the animation could not all be accounted for by love to the memory even of Schiller. Poems were read, and speeches were made describing his character as poet, historian, or otherwise, according to the fancy of each speaker. I remember one from Bodenstedt, than whom few stand higher in the walks of polite literature, and one from Sybel, than whom no one in Germany ranks higher as a historian. Dr. Neumann, who, like an old parade horse long withrawn from the excitements of a parade, felt amid these scenes the spirit of former days stirred within him, rose to speak. We shall be prepared to appreciate the effect when we get an idea of the preternatural sensitiveness of those who composed the audience. A well-known poet, who may perhaps be called the poet-laureate of Bavaria, had read a poem on the occasion. It contained nothing to which any one could object, as we might infer from his position with the king, and yet I heard the poet himself say a few days afterward that the editors of a certain well-known journal, in publishing it, left out the stanzas containing the word _Freiheit_ (liberty), so fearful were they of not pitching their tune to a key that would suit royal and Government ears. A similar sensitiveness pervaded the whole body present--nearly all drew their bread and beer from the Government, and did not wish it stopped or diminished. This class had gotten up the meeting, and hoped to control it. When they saw Dr. Neumann rise, they felt that _there_ was a man _naturally_ fearless, and _now_ quite beyond that special sense of danger which made them cautious. Recollection passed over his seven years' silence, and called up the power with which he had harangued in other years. Nor was it so much what he said as the man who said it, which produced the effect, and yet there was much in the speech. He said that Schiller had been eulogized as a social and domestic man, poet, and historian; but nothing had been said of him as a _politician_, and he should speak of him in this character. The _rising_ of _such_ a man was an electric shock, suggestive of that which in 1848 made all Europe tremble from centre to circumference. The word _politician_ was a _second_ shock, drawing with it suggestively all the concomitants of that revolution, as yet so well remembered by all. And when he proceeded to compare Schiller with Goethe--the _former_ frankly addressing himself to his friend in correspondence on the great questions of their politics, and trying to draw him out, the _latter_, then a minister of state, cautiously and warily declining to expose his views--he but carried out the impression made in his rising and his announcement. It was the only properly stump speech--I use the phrase in the high sense in which it might be used of O'Connell or Clay--I ever heard in Germany.

Such is the man who has undertaken to write our country's history for the Germans. Of his _work_ I have said nothing, for I have not seen it; I write this impromptu on seeing the newspaper announcement of the first volume. He will doubtless do much to set us right in the eyes of his own people, where, however, there is less need of this than in _another_ land, whose people are more nearly related to us, where such service, however, is less likely to be done.

THE GREAT AMERICAN CRISIS.

_PART THREE._

In the last preceding article on this subject in THE CONTINENTAL, we concluded by considering the consequences of an early victory of the North over the entire South, _followed by the restoration of the old Union upon precisely the old basis_. We showed that, in such an event, the war would have been barren of results even to the extent of removing its own cause, or preventing its almost immediate and more desperate renewal; that the question at issue is a question of paramount governing power between two adverse theories of social existence; between two distinct and conflicting civilizations; between two antagonistic and irreconcilable political and moral forces; and that it must be fought out to the complete subordination of the less advanced or more barbarous and backward-tending of those forces--unless the wheels of progress on this continent are to be reversed, and the watchword of despotism be substituted for that of freedom: not only that it must be fought out on the battle field, but that the fruits of the victory must not be blindly or foolishly surrendered after the obvious and external victory is won.

We may say here, however, for the purpose of reserving the still more radical consideration of the nature of this conflict for some future day, that, adverse as these theories of social existence are--distinct and conflicting as are these two civilizations--antagonistic and irreconcilable as these contending political and moral forces now seem, and for present practical purposes must be taken to be--they are not _essentially_ irreconcilable. Slavery, bad as it is, represents a truth in the larger Compound Truth of an Integral Social Philosophy. A deeper understanding of the whole problem of human society, possessed by the leading personages, North and South, would have saved the necessity of this war--would at this day even, adjust it peaceably, harmoniously, and perfectly, and would render unnecessary the whole view of the subject which we are now taking. The world, however, is not yet quite prepared for the peaceable intervention of scientific and truly philosophic methods in the settlement of its disputes; and the knowledge of the existence, even, of such methods, is as yet too little diffused to make them in any sense available for the purposes of the hour. The point of view from which these papers are being written, is, indeed, as stated in the last preceding number, higher than that of the ordinary politician, the constitutional lawyer, or even that of common statesmanship and patriotic devotion. It is a point of view from which the interests of all mankind are taken into the account, and hence pertains, in a sense, to the domain of practical philosophy, or the universal aspect of politics; the politics of the globe and of all humanity, in all time. But it offers still a presentation of the subject toned down to the actual state of readiness in the world to hear reason, and to be influenced or governed by the suggestions contained in the writing. It is therefore an adaptation to an imperfect order of things, a mixed or concrete phase of political practical philosophy, which is the most that can now be aspired to. The point of view in question is therefore far lower than that of a final social philosophy having its basis in a perfect scientific theory, and working out from that basis into practical life. Perhaps, as will be again suggested in the course of this article, the events of this war may conduce to a readiness on this continent, or may create an earnest demand even, for higher solutions and the thorough treatment, by some competent mind, of all our Political and Sociatory problems. The day, however, for such a radical diagnosis and treatment of the disease of human society has not yet arrived.

In the mean time we must content ourselves with partial remedies, alleviations, best temporary resorts, and even desperate expedients. It is from this stand-point that the writer of these articles now speaks; that, feeling deeply in his heart and recognizing clearly in his head the common brotherhood and the equal essential manhood of the inhabitants of the Southern and Northern States--sympathetically and socially drawn, even, to the Southern side, by many endearing associations and recollections; that, clearly appreciating the fratricidal nature of this war--its essential non-necessity, if men were wise enough to avail themselves of better known and feasible, methods--he still deliberately and forcibly insists, under the circumstances which are, that the North should not only fight out the war to the last word of determinate conquest, but that it should, with wise but merciless rigor, extinguish the cause of the war, and hold with unflinching hand every advantage it gains, until new institutions and new methods of thought shall have been securely planted on every inch of the soil of the South.

Since, even, the last previous part of this series of papers was sent to the press, new and alarming indications have appeared in various quarters, of the drift in the public mind--North--in favor of an easy-going and conceding policy toward the South as the war draws to a close; a policy which would be nearly certain to lose to ourselves and to the world all the benefits of the war; to deprive the South, even, of those higher and ulterior benefits which would come to her also; to leave untouched the causes of the war, and to foster its early renewal with more than its former desperation.

Not to mention the reiterated and urgent renewals of the subject of reconstruction in quarters where we are accustomed to look for a partial loyalty or a covert opposition to the war, articles like the following, from the New York _Times_, of November 19th, frequently appear in the undoubtedly loyal press:

'RECONSTRUCTION.--Since we have been at the trouble of conquering the rebels in the State of Arkansas--since, after many great victories, we have now complete military possession of the State, and have armies posted on its eastern, western, and northern lines, and at its capital in the centre--we think it would be worth while in the Government to take steps to reorganize the civil administration there, and inaugurate a system of policy such as was adopted in Missouri two years ago, and which has proved so successful in pacifying that State. The loyal element in Arkansas is large, as is made evident by the action of the people wherever our forces have penetrated, and by the enlistment of a good number of its citizens in the armies of the Union. One of the Senators from Arkansas, Senator Sebastian, whose term of office is as yet unexpired, is, and always has been, we believe, a sound loyal man; and Mr. Gantt, who was elected to Congress just before the outbreak of the rebellion, has recently given proof of his repentance and devotion to the Union in the remarkable address which we published last week. We do not see why the process of reconstruction might not be at once commenced in Arkansas, and why, before the close of next session, the State might not have a full congressional delegation in Washington.'

Not a word is here said of the important question of Slavery. The proposition is pure and simple to readmit the rebellious State of Arkansas to the Union, upon precisely the same footing as that upon which we retained the allegiance of Missouri--to treat, in other words, loyal and rebellious States in the same way.

In a subsequent article of the same able journal, one of the organs of the Republican party, this easy-going policy, the _laissez-faire_ of statesmanship, is expanded at large, and explicitly adopted and recommended. The appearance of such an article in such a quarter is such a remarkable index of the existence in the public mind of the delusions we are exposing, that we transfer it bodily to our columns, for the sake of commenting upon its positions. Calhoun's famous expression, 'masterly inactivity,' is significantly adopted as a caption:

'CIVIL POLICY TOWARD SLAVERY.--There is a class of men who stick to the idea that something positive must be done by the Federal Government to end slavery. Even the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, a military measure for military ends solely, does not satisfy them. They want civil power exercised, and would gladly have even a breaking down of State lines and a reconstruction of the Government itself, as the only effectual means of destroying the institution of their special abhorrence.

'Now we, too, claim a good hearty hatred of slavery. We are as anxious as any to see it under the sod, beyond resurrection. But we don't believe in making any superfluous sacrifice to get it there. Seeing that it is dying, we are quite content to let it die quietly, without any attempt to pull the house down about its ears and our own ears. This seems to us to be a very absurd sort of impatience--prompted by giddy passion rather than sober reason.

'But how do we know slavery is dying? We know it from the unanimous testimony of all personal observers of its condition. There is not a man within the Union lines South, however friendly he may be to the institution, who pretends that there is any chance whatever of its being saved, _if present causes continue_. Two things are killing it.

'_The first is the wear and tear of the war. Military operations always tend to disjoint and break up, within their scope, all the relations of society. They inevitably remit, to a greater or less extent, the social man to a state of nature. Inter arma leges silent_. This is felt in every social connection, even the closest and strongest; for they all are, more or less, dependent on civil law. But it must be felt particularly in that connection, which of all others is the most forced and arbitrary--the connection between master and slave. Liberty is a natural instinct. The caged bird is not surer to fly through the parted wires than the slave, in his ordinary condition, from the broken chain--_and the chain must be broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes away_. There are men who complain of the anti-slavery war policy of the President. A policy that was anything else would not be a war policy at all. The war upon the rebellious slaveholding people of necessity involves an interruption of their laws; and unless the advancing army should make good this absence of civil rule by applying its own military power to keeping watch and ward over the slaves, and thus abandon its proper military business, the result is inevitable _that the institution must melt away as the war goes on_. Abraham Lincoln might be as much attached to slavery as Jefferson Davis himself, and yet no human sagacity would enable him to fight Jefferson Davis honestly and effectually without mortal injury to slavery. _It is the war which kills slavery, and not the man who leads the war_.

'_The other destroying agency in open discussion_. Slavery can live only in silence. There is a deadly antagonism between itself and free speech. Where the one exists the other cannot. The vitality of the one rests in pure force, and force and reason never agree. It always has been, and always will be, that force must either suppress reason or reason will subvert force. One of the first acts of the slavery propagandists in Kansas was to pass enactments through their spurious Legislature, making it a felony, punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, for any man to 'assert or maintain by speaking or writing that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory.' It has been so in every Slave State, and worse. _Not only have slave codes interdicted, in every one of them, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a necessity_. Slavery being once accepted as the prime object, there was no alternative but to protect it just in this manner. _But the war has ended all that. There can be no mobs where the bayonet governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans as in New York_. It is no more within the province of the military Governor, Shepley, to interfere with fair discussion there, than it is within the rightful power of the civil Governor, Seymour, to interfere with it here. _And in the Border States, where the civil laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that by general consent perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution._ The consequence of this freedom has been that Missouri has already determined to abolish it; Maryland and Delaware have put declared emancipationists in places of their highest trusts by unprecedented majorities; and Kentucky is visibly casting about to see how she can best rid herself of the curse.

'_We say, then, that even if the National Government had the right to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply to stand quiet, and let these agencies work_.'

The italics are our own, inserted for the sake of more easy reference. Not only is it unnecessary, according to this writer, to take any active and positive steps against Slavery at the South, but so soon as the rebel States wish to return within the Union, with all their old privileges and with Slavery surviving, they should be permitted to do so, and should be received with open arms. The Proclamation of Emancipation itself is thus quietly wiped out, and a policy sketched which, in the event of mere military defeat on their part, would, in the next place, be the most acceptable of all possible policies;--not to the loyal black men who are now struggling, fighting, and dying alongside of us, in the ranks; not to the small and feeble but growing anti-slavery party, which, in the presence of, and under the protection of our armies of the North, is just springing up and consolidating itself in the South;--but to Jefferson Davis himself, and to all the devoted and fanatical adherents of the slaveholding system in the South, and their 'Copperhead' friends in the North. The _Times_ article concludes as follows:

'But we go farther, and say, that any other interference would not only be superfluous, but positively mischievous. To insure that slavery, when it dies, shall never rise again, you have got to depend largely upon the disposition of the Southern people. That disposition should not be needlessly embittered. It can't help becoming so if, as some propose, their States are reduced to the condition of mere territorial dependencies. Americans can never be satisfied to be underlings. Whatever the fortunes of war legitimately bring, they are sensible enough to submit to; but it is not in their spirit to consent to any permanent degradation. Undertake to deprive them permanently of their civil rights, and you simply make them your permanent enemies. _Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable effect will be that you will only make them love slavery the more, and hate you the more. This could not always continue. State rights, sooner or later, would have to be restored. We don't believe that three years would elapse after the close of the war before the keeping those States in a territorial condition would be abandoned as an insufferable anomaly in our system of government. State rights once restored, the people, maddened by the thrall that had been put upon them, would be very likely to vindicate these rights by rehabilitating slavery. Every incentive of high pride and every impulse of low spite would combine to urge this; and the National Government would have no legitimate way of preventing it_.

'It will never do to try to give slavery its lasting quietus by mere arbitrary force. To secure this we have got to rely in no small measure upon reason. We must never forget that just as Force is the natural ally of Slavery, just so Reason is the natural ally of Freedom. _When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a fair chance to assert itself_. Military authority over each reclaimed State should last until the majority of the people have made up their mind to resume, in good faith, their old relations to the Government, and have had a fair opportunity to canvass how that resumption shall best be inaugurated. Of course the machinery of the State Government cannot be given over to traitors; _but whenever there is sound reason to believe that a fair loyal majority of the State want it, let them have it--and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery. If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out, and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will. For slavery, after having been crippled as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way_.'

Compare, now, in the fair spirit of criticism, the beginning and the end of this unstatesman-like editorial. Slavery, we are emphatically told, is dying; first, because the presence of the war in its immediate vicinity is killing it; and, secondly, because free discussion, excited by the war and the presence of Northern influence incidental to the war, is killing it--_therefore let us hasten to withdraw the military power, and the causes of free discussion, where, for a century, it has been annihilated until now, and has only now begun to exist, and leave in full activity all the causes of reaction and the reëstablishment of the old STATUS. 'There is not the slightest chance, whatever,' says the writer, 'of slavery being saved_, IF PRESENT CAUSES CONTINUE.' Therefore _hasten to discontinue present causes, by all means, and surrender the field to the operation of the old causes. 'The chain'_ of the slave '_must be broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes away_.' Therefore hasten to restore the civil law to its old and tyrannical potency over the destiny of the slave. '_The institution must melt away as the war goes on_.' Therefore, hasten not merely to finish the active stage of the war, but _to surrender the power which victory will place in your hands to continue the same emancipating influences_; and to surrender it into the hands of men avowedly hostile to your policy, and who have been conquered fighting for their franchise to enslave.

'_Not only_,' continues our editor, '_have slave codes interdicted, in every one of the Slave States, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a necessity_.' Hasten, therefore, to reëstablish these engines of terrorism and the institution which inevitably demands their existence. Ignore and set aside the Proclamation of Emancipation; betray the auxiliary black man; throttle and destroy the incipient party of freedom in its birth; turn the Young South, just rising into existence as the friend of liberty and progress, over, stripped and unprotected, into the hands of the Old South, with its thongs, its thumbscrews, and its Lynch law; throw aside, the moment it is acquired, the power to civilize and regenerate the South--not because the war and the free discussion which accompany the war _have killed slavery_, but because they _are killing it_, and will be sure to kill it unless they are speedily withdrawn.

'But the war,' we are told, 'has ended all that. _There can be no mobs where the bayonet governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans as it is in New York.'_ _True: therefore_, hasten to restore the reign of mobs, or you will hurt the feelings of the men who make the mobs. Withdraw speedily 'the general military law,' and its 'paramount' control, expressly in order that the operation of 'the arbitrary local laws' may be resumed. Urge up the measures which will put an end to the state of affairs in which 'the discussion of slavery is as free in New Orleans as it is in New York.'

_'And in the Border States, where the civil laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that, by general consent, perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution.'_ This is true while a United States force is in the vicinity to overawe traitors--while the friends of freedom feel confident that they have the strength of a nation at their back to aid them in resisting the local tyranny; hasten, therefore, to remove these supports, and leave them to struggle single handed and hopelessly against an inveterate and hoary despotism, which knows no law higher than its own will; and which has always been competent to crush out every rising aspiration toward freedom; until the accidental advantages of the war encouraged that timid utterance of true American sentiment in those quarters which is just now beginning feebly to make itself heard and felt. Hasten, therefore, to withdraw that support at the instant of time when the local friends of freedom have just been induced to declare themselves, and so to become the unshielded victims of slaveholding vindictiveness the instant the provisional security of the new party derived from abroad ceases to exist. What would 'the dissatisfaction with slavery' from 'hostility to the rebellion' have amounted to in Maryland, as a power, against the haughty and overbearing authority of the slaveholding Despotism, at the commencement of the war, without the intervention of General Butler; or that of Missouri, without that of General Fremont? What would that same dissatisfaction with Slavery amount to at this very day even, in those States, against the reflex wave of pro-slavery influence and power, if all influence from the armies and authority of the United States were completely withdrawn? Or, granting even that in those two Border States, the most advanced of all, the most under ordinary influences from the Free States, there is already inaugurated an Anti-slavery Movement which would retain energy enough to carry on the struggle without foreign aid--which even is extremely doubtful; the case would stand wholly otherwise in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or Arkansas, where no well-constituted Party of Freedom has as yet achieved any successes, and where the slaveholding interest and desperation are ten times stronger than they are in the Border States.

'_'We say, then,_ says the _Times_ writer, '_that even if the National Government had the right to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply to stand quiet and let those influences work._'

All this, urged for the purposes for which it is here urged, is simply crying, Peace! peace! when there is no peace. If these influences, the presence of the war power and free discussion, be to continue, very good. Then, indeed, is there a chance, amounting almost to a certainty, that Slavery will have to succumb, and all of these considerations, urged as a reason why the war power should be retained for an adequate period over the Slave States, even after their nominal submission, and free discussion encouraged and protected by that power--which we understand to be the policy recommended by General Butler--are consequent, logical, and patriotic; but put forth as reasons why we should hasten to surrender the influence over the destiny of man which has been so providentially, and yet with such immense sacrifice, placed in our hands, they are practically hostile to the vital purposes of the war, however honest and simple minded may be the individuals who recommend them.

Again: _'Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable result will be that you will only make them love slavery the more,'_ etc.

It is not our purpose to insist on the technical process of _territorializing_ the conquered rebel States. What we do insist on is that the military authority, which the nation has so laboriously asserted and acquired over them, shall not be withdrawn until the natural and necessary and appropriate consequences of the war shall have been attained; and that among these is the inauguration of Freedom instead of the reinstitution of that hideous anomaly of the nations, American Slavery. We insist that the rising, but as yet the feeble and timid Freedom Party of the South, including the blacks and a growing number of the poor whites, so fast as they become rightly informed, with a small number of enlightened, generous, and noble-minded men of the planter class, who sympathize with freedom, and are truly loyal in sympathy and soul to American principles and the American Government, be regarded and treated as the new and loyal South; and not a trumped-up party, which may arise any day, of as bitter traitors as ever lived, but who, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, which is, at bottom, Slavery, and nothing else, under the present issue of war, shall give in a hollow and pretended profession of loyalty, in order to secure, by other means, the same end. Does this truly loyal party at the South anywhere as yet wish the withdrawal of the protection of the General Government, and desire to be turned over to the tender mercies of their false and subtle enemy--which are unheard-of cruelties? Let the representation of the thousand loyal men from Middle Tennessee, recently made to the President of the United States, answer. On the contrary, there is nothing which those men so greatly dread--nothing which so checks their more rapid development as a party--as the fear that they may be so abandoned before their work is sufficiently advanced to secure its completion.

The three years which the _Times_ writer concedes to the existence of an anomaly in our Government, may be amply enough to accomplish all that is required. So far from imbittering the feelings of the true friends of the Union in the South, assurance of the continuance of such a protection over them, even for that length of time, would infuse new confidence and new activity into all their movements. It is clearly the right of the policeman to judge when the mob is effectually suppressed, and as much his duty not to allow himself to be surprised and over-mastered by a pretended and hollow submission for the sake of seizing an advantage, as it is to inflict effectual blows of his cudgel while the row is in its more flagrant stages of development. The United States, having interfered by force to suppress a national riot, has a clear right, and a bounden duty, not to abandon the region of the disturbance until the _animus_ of rebellion is subdued as effectually as its open manifestation; and knowing that that _animus_ is identical with the spirit, purposes, and designs of the slaveholding class--a conspiracy, in fine, to overthrow the Government in that sole behalf--it is alike bound effectually to cripple or actually to exterminate that malign influence.

Again says our writer under review: '_When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a chance to assert itself._' Very true, if the mode of doing so be not foolishly misunderstood. The error here is in speaking of the South as one, whereas from this time forward and for some years to come, there will be an Old South, rebellious at heart, malignant, defiant, cruel, and revengeful to the last degree--bold, accustomed to rule with unquestioned authority--and, when conquered, refusing to remain conquered, except as the grapple of the conqueror is still at its throat; and a New South, loyal, loving, and devoted to its deliverers, but timid, shrinking, and tentative of its powers--liberty-loving, and truly American in sentiment, but unused to the exercise of political supremacy, unorganized, and weak;--an old South, refusing every appeal to reason, and only thirsting for vengeance; and a new South, ready to reason and to be reasoned with, and looking gratefully to the National Government as its guide and protector in the unequal contest before it--more fearful to it than ever--at the close of the war. How, then, shall we 'give the reason of the South a chance to assert itself'? By withdrawing our support from our friends, and the friends of America, and of man, in the South, and turning them over, like sheep to the wolves, to their unreasoning and vindictive enemies; or by standing by them in the weakness of their first essay to depend on reason and justice in the place of force or fraud; by developing, in fine, the reason of the South, which has been for a century overridden and suppressed by the incubus of an organized despotism, from which there is now, for the first time, the chance of a redemption, if these _friends_ of Southern reason do not commit a blunder in their understanding of the case?

'_Whenever_,' says the _Times_ writer, '_there is sound reason to believe that a sound loyal majority of the State want it (reconstruction), let them have it--and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery_.' That is to say, abandon the Proclamation of Emancipation, betray the colored man, who, trusting to our faith, is now enrolling himself in our armies; betray the timid friends of freedom, who, by our encouragement, have dared to proclaim their love of liberty, and subject themselves to inevitable banishment or extermination, unless the programme of a new free South be executed triumphantly and to the letter; furnish to the most malignant slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of 'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the rattlesnake. The most imbittering and offensive thing that _can ever be done_ to those men _is done_ the moment you pronounce the words of freedom and human rights, in conjunction with each other, as if they were the same thing. That done, every other measure grows mild. To territorialize the whole South, and place a satrap over every parish and county of it--saying no word for freedom--would be a gentle and conciliating procedure compared with the most innocent utterance of a mere sentiment in behalf of emancipation and the elevation of the negro to the status of a man. Why, then, strain at a gnat when we have already swallowed a camel? If we mean anything by Emancipation Proclamations, the organization of negro troops, or even by our own inherent love of liberty, nothing after that need ever be handled gingerly with the South. Every recommendation to abstain from giving her offence is simply a recommendation to recede, not only from our whole war policy now so happily inaugurated, but to recede from every genuine and efficient sentiment the Northern people may entertain, or ever have entertained, in behalf of the distinctively American idea: the freedom and equality before the law of all men.

_'If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out,'_ continues our editor, _'and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will; for slavery, after having been crippled, as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way'._

Now it is precisely this simple-minded and easy credence that everything will go right if it be at once handed over to the management of the men who may have been whipped in the battle field--this overweening confidence on the part of good men, and intelligent men, too, in the ordinary sense of intelligence, at the North, which is the most dangerous feature of the whole matter. We are just entering upon the real crisis of the war, when the war, by many, will be thought finished. It is exceedingly doubtful whether in any single Border State the Anti-slavery Movement has received as yet any such impetus or gained any such secure foothold that it could maintain the struggle for a six months, if the influence growing out of the presence of the war in their midst were withdrawn, and the political power were remanded in full to the local authorities; and, in respect to the States farther South, and wholly committed to the institution, it is certain that Slavery has hardly received what would prove a serious scratch upon its epidermis, if such changes were now to take place.

Indeed, on the contrary, there was never a time when temptation to slaveholding was a third part what it is to-day, aside from the threat of danger hanging over it from the continuance of the war, and the supposed determination of the Northern conquerors to put an end to it. The vital principle of Slavery which overrides every other consideration, is the extra-profitable nature and state of slave-labor products. The writer has himself seen Slavery firmly seated in the saddle and unassailable in an exposed region of the South, with cotton at from eight to twelve cents on the pound, and the same institution trembling toward its downfall when cotton fell to four and a half and five cents on the plantation. What must then be its hold on the cupidity of Southern men when the condition of Slavery, by virtue of the same state of war which threatens its existence on the one hand, has caused the price of cotton to rule, on the other hand, from twenty-five to seventy-five cents a pound, and has affected, in a somewhat similar way, every other product of the sort! An immense premium is thus offered for the continuance of the institution, and the danger is not slight that our own Northern men, thrown into the South, would be seduced, in great numbers, by the temptation, into becoming themselves slavery propagandists, unless the exigencies of the war, the _esprit du corps_, and the solidarity of interests springing up between them and the negro soldiers, and the prompt and energetic activity of the Government in behalf of an emancipation policy were all to combine to prevent it. In talking of Slavery, its power, its weakness, or its prospects, men, unless they have been intimately mixed up with its workings, are apt to be reckoning without their host. Our own sentiment of justice in the matter, North, poor and feeble as it is in most of us, is immensely aided by the negative fact that our interests do not happen to be immediately involved adversely. Not one in ten thousand of Northern men or Europeans, thrown into the South previous to the war, ever withstood the infection of pro-slavery sentiment and action. Our soldiers do so now, only because they are in large bodies, because they are fighting the Southern men, and because they are becoming more and more identified with a distinct national policy in behalf of emancipation and the rights of man. Withdraw these causes, and the effects would be rapidly reversed. Northern officers and men could not be trusted to fraternize with the slave-holding aristocracy, previous to the time when the backbone of the institution of Slavery should have been effectually broken; not because they are bad men, but because they are men, and would act, under similar circumstances, as men--alike Northern, Southern, and European men--have acted in the years that are past. There is a far more reliable and trustworthy party of Southern anti-slavery men than are as yet their Northern allies; men who have suffered intensely from actual contact and struggle with the institution, and who have felt, in some measure, the steel of Slavery enter their own souls; but they are not numerous enough to stand without the aid of these same untrustworthy Northern auxiliaries, who already, at the first indication of incipient success for our arms, propose, like this writer, to remand them to the tender mercies of a Southern majority rule. It is the fear of this treachery which makes them so few as they are, and so weak. It is these men whom we wish to see sustained, recognized as the loyal and the new South, and aided in the work of reconstruction, when the somewhat distant period for it to be safe and wise shall have arrived. They are the men who will teach us wisdom, if we will follow their advice; and they, be assured of it, will not clamor for any early and thoughtless surrender of our present advantages, for fear of hurting the sensibilities of the South by imposing a sense of 'subordination.' With the agony of despair, such men would remonstrate against any such suicidal policy, and entreat the Government of the United States and the people of the North to stand by them in their great distress, through, until the end. While writing, the following newspaper paragraph attracts our attention, and is a fair expression of the truth we are seeking to inculcate:

'The Hon. Silas Casey, of Kentucky, brings news of the most intense feeling, on the subject of holding slaves in the Border States, among Union men. They contend that the restriction in the President's Proclamation has made Kentucky and Tennessee a 'national slave pen,' where slaves, fleeing from the 'confederate' States, are bought and sold by the thousand. He says the Unionists to a man are in favor of immediate and sweeping emancipation of all slaves within their borders--that there can be no protection for a Unionist as long as aristocratic secessionists are allowed to hold all their old slaves, and are protected in buying human beings, once freed by the President's Proclamation. The last and most important step to be taken by the Government, to insure Unionism in the Border States, is to emancipate the slaves of disloyalists in Kentucky and Tennessee. The military once removed from Kentucky, and again would commence the barbarism of slavery. Defenders of the Government would be murdered--freedom of speech be denied; the expulsion of Northern ministers, and the tar-and-feathering of Northern schoolmasters, for only preferring Union to secession, freedom to slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville, his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again, with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.'

The following comments are equally true:

'Again we call the attention of thoughtful men to the current phases of 'Border State' politics, and ask that they be deeply considered. If we open a hundred 'conservative' journals in succession, we shall find at least ninety of them asserting or assuming that the revolted States are to be reconciled to the Union by new concessions, new guarantees to slavery. But those States themselves emphatically repel this assumption. Every man in Delaware, in Maryland, in Tennessee, in Missouri, who is heartily and thoroughly anti-rebel is also anti-slavery, and nearly every one is for immediate, not gradual, emancipation. They were not Republicans; not one in twenty of them voted for Lincoln; they make no special pretensions to philanthropy; but they mean to live and die in the Union, and they do not choose to have their throats cut by rebels; so they desire that slavery should die, knowing by practical experience, by personal observation, that slavery and the rebellion are but two phases of the same thing--two names for one reality.'

Slavery, as things are, is neither 'crippled' nor 'half dead.' It is only a little sick, and threatened with being made more so, if the same effectual blows which have been dealt it are followed up hereafter with other blows still more effectual.

We have reason to believe that the writer of the _Times_ article we have been reviewing, has passed some time with the Army of the Cumberland; that he has viewed the subject impartially from what he deems a large field of observation; and that he speaks honestly what he believes. But no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case. Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band of patriots--reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies--and he will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the confederacy is already knocked out; that Slavery is already dead, and cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc. With profound respect for General Grant as a man and a soldier, we would still prefer the opinion, on this point, of any earnest member of the young and feeble anti-slavery party of the South, who resides a few miles away from the actual reach of the authority and influence of a Federal army.

It is refreshing to know that to this opinion of the victorious general, of exceedingly doubtful value, upon the specific point in question, he adds these memorable and patriotic words:

'I never was an Abolitionist, not even what would be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not, therefore, be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.'

Almost the only men in the nation who are really competent to judge when Slavery is really dead, in any region, are those Northern and Western anti-slavery men who have come into long and deadly collision with its spirit and power in Kansas and upon the western border of Missouri. Even Northern and Eastern Abolitionists, better versed perhaps in the theory of the subject, would prove very incompetent if matched in practical hostility with slaveholding opinion and might--slaveholding vindictiveness, cunning, treachery, and recklessness of every consideration, human or divine, but the gaining of their one end, the retention of their hold over the slave.

It is again refreshing, in the midst of the open or covert defence and protection among us of the surviving remnant of Slavery at the South, granting for the moment that it is now reduced to that, and in the midst of such easy and over-credulous and mistaken assumptions of its complete, virtual destruction already, by undoubted friends of freedom, as in the case of the _Times_ editor, General Grant, and numerous others, to listen to such hearty utterances, in the keynote of the right policy, as were made by Secretary Chase in his recent speech at Cincinnati, and to be able to believe that they foreshadow the course of the Administration in this trying epoch of our country's history. We quote the following report:

'It was never intended to interfere with States that were loyal. This Proclamation comes up as a great feature in this war. In my judgment the Proclamation was the right thing in the right place, and without it I am just as sure as I am of my own existence that we could not have made the progress we have made. And I hold that the man who denounces the Proclamation either speaks ignorantly, speaks about that of which he knows little or nothing, or else he really desires that the rebellion should succeed.

'There are two classes of States in the South; there is the class of States that is affected by the Proclamation, and a class of States that is not. With this last class of States, which is not affected by the Proclamation, we have simply nothing to do, except to bid God speed to the unconditional Union men of those States, that they will do their own work in their own way and in their own time, and all we have to do is to stand by them.

'But in the States which are affected by the Proclamation the case is different. Either the Proclamation was a great, monstrous sham, and an imposition in the face of the world, or else that Proclamation was an effectual thing, and there are no slaves to-day in the rebel States. They are all enfranchised by the Proclamation, for what says it? All the slaves of these States are declared now and forever free, and the executive power is pledged to the maintenance of their freedom. If it were not so it would be a national imposture, and I would no more be guilty of that piece of infamy than I would steal into your house at night and rob your pantry. But what have we to do with this Proclamation in the rebellious Slave States? It is a very simple thing: _just simply recognise the Union men who remain in those States_. Such men as Mr. Flanders, and Mr. May, and a whole host of others, who were known as slaveowners, are now satisfied that the Union men of the South must see to it that slavery must never be permitted to be reëstablished in those States. Take such a man as the Hon. Charles Anderson. When he went home and stood up for the Union, what did the slave aristocracy do for him? They drove him from the State, and his wife and little ones were obliged to take shelter in the bush. And so with multitudes of Union men in Texas at the present day. But all of them wish to get back and establish a Free State in Texas; because, they say, no other than a Free State can ever protect them from the enemies of human freedom, and, I was going to say, of human nature. Again, in Florida there were many who were driven away who are now anxious to return. Is there a man here who wants these noble, generous Union men of the South _to go back to be trampled under foot by restored rebels_! Let them go back, but let them go back under the ægis of the American Union, and the protection of the Government pledged to them, and then they will take care to settle this question of slavery. They will amend the Constitution so as to put the slavery question where it ought to be. When that is done, who is going to talk about the Proclamation? You have here, my fellow citizens, an intelligent statement, as it seems to me, of the manner in which this thing can be settled: simply by standing by the unconditional Union men--who almost all of them have embraced the doctrine of emancipation in the Border States--and standing by the Union men in the rebellious States, and letting them protect themselves against the institution of slavery.'

At this stage of the present writing, and having just transferred these manly, patriotic, and statesmanlike sentiments to our columns, hoping that they might foreshadow the fixed policy of the Administration, of which Mr. Chase is so able and distinguished a member, we are overtaken by more than a full fruition of the hope in the publication of the President's Message and Proclamation of Amnesty to the South, upon the sole condition of the perpetual maintenance of the Proclamation of Emancipation issued a year ago; in other words, upon the condition of the total and definitive extinction of Slavery in the South. The men of the South who are ready for this are to be recognized as the loyal citizens, the New South--precisely what ought to be done. The machinery of the old State Governments is to remain intact, but to be turned over to this regenerated Southern party for administration. The whole military and civil force of the Union is to retain its guardianship over the South, during the transition, and to remain pledged to the maintenance of the status of freedom united with loyalty, until, by the growth and stability of the new order of things, the conquered territory shall dispense with its continued intervention. The plan devised by the President is admirable, and symptoms already exist that, like so many other of his leading measures, it is destined to meet with unbounded acceptance and popularity, from even the most diverse and disharmonious quarters. Trusting, therefore, that the practical administration of the war is drifting into the right policy, based on the true theory of its causes and legitimate termination, we may leave these merely political and military questions, and revert, in conclusion, to the possible remaining eventualities of the war. These may be, for the time, (1.) Seemingly prosperous and fortunate, or, (2.) Seemingly accompanied with disaster, discouragement, and dismay--ulterior even to the eventual triumph of our arms over the open enemies of the existing order of things.

Firstly, then, it may happen, that from this time out we shall be more and more decisively triumphant over the 'rump' of the rebellion still extant in the South; that the new policy of emancipation now so favorably inaugurated may work like a magical charm, and that among the happy and startling surprises to which we are daily becoming addicted, may be that of an unexpected readiness in the exhausted and repentant South to acquiesce in the new order of things; that our new financial scheme may develop germs of commercial prosperity more than adequate to compensate for all the strain upon our national energy and resources imposed by the war; that an immense and unparalleled expansion of national prosperity, hardly marred by the ripple of our financial encumbrances, may be in waiting for the future United States of America, and lie spread out in the immediate future before us; that untold wealth may be unearthed from our mines, marvellous discoveries and inventions made to increase our manufactures and means of locomotion, and new sources of learning and art and practical action be opened.

Suppose even less brilliant and rapid results. Suppose that the war lingers; that numerous and desperate battles have yet to be fought, and some reverses to be endured; but that we continue to hold the heart of the South up to our present lines in Georgia and East Tennessee; that the new system of things is gradually established and becomes solidified within the States already possessed: even this state of things, if providentially enforced on us after our best exertions have been put forth to succeed, may, again, unexpectedly prove to have concealed under seeming failure a more fortunate termination of our herculean work. Perhaps there is even yet not enough national virtue among us to leaven the whole lump, and thus, by being delayed of our too greedy aspirations for success, we may only the more surely succeed. A halt at this period of the war was foreshadowed, it will be remembered by the reader, in the earlier portion of this series of papers, written more than two years ago. At any rate, if the remaining resistance of the rebel government should prove more obstinate and prolonged than is now generally anticipated, let there be no discouragement, and no serious disappointment. Remember again, in that event, that our supreme triumphs are moral and social, for which our military successes are merely a basis; and that moral and social changes demand time to be consolidated and secured. Immense changes are being rapidly effected in the public sentiment and the prospective action of the reconquered portions of the South; but such changes are not made in a day; and some retardation of the national aspiration for a speedy termination of the war may prove our providential security against evils which, our own precipitancy might possibly otherwise incur. The retention of our present hold, the gradual but slow progress to a complete final conquest, and the steady assimilation of the reintegrated portions of the South with our Northern and the truly American character and sentiment, would still, therefore, deserve to be reckoned upon the side of seeming or obvious success.

But on the other hand, let us consider, for a moment, the other alternative--that of apparent disaster, incurred from the war, not so much in the light of overwhelming military defeats, which need hardly now to be seriously apprehended, as from financial exhaustion and other secondary causes introduced into the working of our national and social life through the operation and influence of the war. Mr. Cobden, undoubtedly a friend of our nation, and a shrewd observer of the world's affairs on the basis of experience, or a knowledge of the past, warns us to look forward to a period of almost utter prostration after the war shall have terminated, and to a train of serious consequences from the terrific strain put by it upon our energies and resources. Forebodings of a similar kind haunt the imaginations of many of our own citizens. The history of past wars and their results justify the anticipation. Perchance all this may prove an unnecessary fear. It may happen that the almost boundless recuperative energies of this young American civilization of ours may be destined to astonish our enemies, our friends, and ourselves, as much as the extent of our resources for action have already done--that the strain put upon us, instead of enfeebling us in the least, has been merely a healthy exercise for the growing muscles and thews of a young giant just now ripening into a first manhood, and never heretofore called upon for any adequate exertion to display his strength. We once heard an enthusiastic and progressive orator, referring to the marvels of modern development, utter, with a sublime and audacious eloquence, the startling assertion that '_Experience is a fool._' There is a sense, no doubt, in which the sentiment is true. Neither the growth, nor the inherent power, nor the elasticity of the rebound from seeming exhaustion, nor the immense acceleration of the rapidity of the future career of the American people, is to be safely measured by a reference to what has occurred with former nationalities, in other and different times. Our experience of the future, whatever it may be, will be, no doubt, essentially different from any of the past.

But assume, on the contrary, that the prediction is essentially well founded; that we have before us, in the immediate future, a period of extreme exhaustion, depression, and even of temporary discouragement in the public mind. All this need not, to the philosophic mind, cause the slightest apprehension of permanent evil results--of any serious check even, to our inevitable destiny, as the heirs of unbounded prosperity and the leaders of the vanguard of the progress of the world. A halt, in this sense, in the rapidity of our career, would be only the necessary price of our immense and invaluable achievement, the elimination of chattel slavery from the constitution of our social and political life. We have still other and great social evils remaining behind. The scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to labor, of the employers to the employed, in the constitution of our free competitive society as it will still remain after Slavery is dead, is the next great practical question which will force itself upon our attention, and insist upon being definitively settled, before we can enter upon that ulterior triumphant national development which is reserved, in the decrees of destiny, for us as a people. This problem, seemingly so difficult, will be found unexpectedly easy of solution, so soon as the thinking and practical mind of the people is seriously called to its consideration. It is worthy of observation, that periods of great pecuniary depression are favorable to the progress of ideas. It is written in the Providence of God that the American people must, within the few years to come, solve the whole problem of justice to the laboring man; must, indeed, accept its office as the Champion and the Illustrator, in a practical way, of Universal Justice, in all the relations of life. Are we prepared to enter on this career, intelligently, lovingly, and with voluntary alacrity, from affection to the True and the Good; or must we be again scourged into the consideration of great questions lying immediately in our way, by the providential inflictions of disaster and distress?

We can now see easily enough, that had we been ready and desirous, as a people, to do justice to the black man, we should have escaped the horrors of a great war. We may predict, with the assurance of a religious faith, backed, we might almost affirm, by the certainty of a scientific demonstration, that if we are already sufficiently prepared to be simply just, we shall be saved from the serious infliction of more national suffering; and that if, on the contrary, this preparation of the heart and the head has not been wrought in us by what we have already endured, we shall be called directly and continuously to the suffering of more and perhaps greater inflictions. 'Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,' but not blindly nor uselessly, and not, therefore, after the right frame of mind has been wrought in the subject of the punishment. The law is precisely the same, whether we speak theologically or from the profoundest philosophical principles; and it may almost be said that the American people have only to choose whether they will immediately enter, with the close of the war, upon a higher career of prosperity, or whether they will endure an additional term of tuition in the school of adversity. These words may seem mystical, unaccompanied with further illustration and elaboration of the ideas, but it is not the place here to pursue them.

Let us proceed with the supposition that we have before us, at the conclusion of this war, a period of great national suffering. Such periods, we have already said, are favorable to the development of thought. We may add, they are alike favorable to the growth of earnest purpose. Through suffering we are perfected. Thought and high purpose are secure bases of noble achievement. If we are not yet prepared to be inducted into our national mission, through providential favor, then let us come to it through the inverse method: _through Ulterior and Reactionary Consequence_.

It may be that we are to endure still more grievous afflictions than pecuniary and commercial revulsion and depression. Our political constitution still bears in its bosom, even after Slavery is removed, dangerous seeds of anarchy and prospective revolution. Within the two years past, grave mutterings, to which American ears have been heretofore altogether unused, have been heard in various quarters, touching the superior advantages of 'strong government,' the speakers, mostly of the higher or wealthier order of life, meaning thereby, the old and retrograde forms of monarchy, or something of that sort. Periods of disaster tend to reveal a latent lack of confidence in the permanency of existing things. Investigations in Sociology impeach the wisdom of our institutions, in common with that of all others that have been tried in the past, from another point of view. Periods of distress and privation stimulate the turbulence of the 'dangerous classes.' All national experience reveals, in fine, the existence, in the very nature of human society, of great antagonistic principles struggling with each other in mighty conflict, and with which no political or governmental arrangements heretofore extant have been adequate rightly to cope.

The great and bloody contest with Slavery, now going on, is an instance of such a conflict; and the fact that we, in the midst of this nineteenth century, had arrived at the knowledge of no better solution of it than an appeal to the old, barbarous, uncertain, and terrible ordeal of battle, is an illustration of the incompetency in question. Slavery, bad as it is, is the representative of a great social principle, which, separated from the special mode of its manifestation, has in it that which is good and right. Mr. Cobden justly characterizes the great American war as an insurrection of aristocracy against the principle of democracy. But aristocracy is not wholly wrong, nor is democracy wholly right, in the nature and constitution of things. These are two great antagonistic principles, when sifted to the bottom; one the principle of Order, through Subordination, the soul of Conservatism; and the other the principle of Freedom, through Individuality, the soul of Progression. Neither will ever expunge or expel the other from the constitution of man, individually or collectively; and it pertains to Science, the Science of Politics, based on the Unity of the Sciences below that level, to be arrived at by humanity in the future, to discover and lead in the complete harmony and reconciliation between the two. The writer of these papers has in manuscript a labored document upon the Slavery question from this more radical and philosophical point of view, which was prepared just previous to the outbreak of the existing war, in the hope of attracting the leading minds, North and South, to the peaceable and scientific solution of the whole Slavery question. But the antagonism was too far advanced, passions too much aroused, the popular ignorance of the existence of higher methods of solution too dense, and the crisis too imminent for the existence of any demand for such considerations then; and the publication of the document was withheld. In it were shown the significance of Slavery as a Fact in History and a Principle in Nature; its Compensations and Advantages; its positive value, in fact, in the larger sense, in the development of human society on the planet; then its destiny to give way in our advancing civilization to the higher doctrine of abstract rights and individual culture through intellectual means; and again, the insufficiency of the latter doctrine, when taken for the whole truth; and finally, to show how, by the intervention of the science of the subject, the value of both the Principles in conflict could be extracted and made coöperative, and their evils completely neutralized. The world not being ripe for the adoption of the superior and rational methods here intimated for the adjustment of our difficulties--the readiness of one party even, without the equal readiness of the other, being inadequate--the crisis and the conflict could not be averted; and that again being the case, it is of the utmost importance that the second in order of the two adverse principles, the principle of democracy, be completely triumphant; not because it is more true, but because it is a more _advanced_ truth, and one step nearer, therefore, to the final solution,_ which will then lap back, and subsume and assimilate and reconcile the whole family of fundamental principles upon which the existence of human society is inexpugnably based_. It is upon this lower ground of adaptation to the exigency of the age and the occasion, and as a means to the development of still higher truths, that we urge the inestimable importance of the effectual conquest over the South by the North.

But the two Principles, thus brought face to face with each other, in deadly array, under the present guise of chattel slavery and republican freedom, are not extinguished in the world, nor in America even, nor are they to be permanently reconciled with each other by any outcoming whatsoever of the present war. These principles are the Aristocratic and the Democratic; the principle of conservative order and progressive freedom. Both are vital and essential forces, ever living, ever active; always antagonistic; never reconciled in the past; never to be reconciled in the future, till it be done finally, effectually, and forever, through the SCIENCE of the subject. By the contingencies of this war still future, by the lingering and disastrous _sequelæ_ of the war, or by other and possible eventualities not yet sufficiently developed to be distinctly cognizable, the inherent and unconquerable antagonism (until reconciled through science) of the great opposing forces in human society is liable to be burst upon us with a conflagration in comparison with which even the devastations of the present war will seem trifling. The writer of these papers anticipated and predicted for a long time, and has not yet fully ceased to anticipate, that the present conflict may gradually shape itself into a desperate and universal struggle, North and South, between these two principles, in their bald, undisguised, and unmitigated hostility; that, in other words, as a party of freedom should be developed at the South, there would be developed _pari passu_ at the North a great reactionary party; assimilating the elements of a _bogus_ democracy and all those who by organization or position are inherently and overweeningly aristocratic; a party bold, powerful, and desperate enough to bring home the civil war to our own doors; in other words, that the war would become a war wholly of Ideas; and those defined down to their sharpest and most ultimate differences of logical significance. In that case, the events of the French Revolution would have been, or will be, repeated in America, on a more gigantic scale. Warning symptoms have already appeared among us of the possibilities of all this. If it be in the good providence of God that we are to escape this terrible ordeal--if it be permitted that this cup of national evils pass from us--it can only be that we are a step farther on in the completion of our education, as a nation, than was obviously revealed to the investigation of the observer; that, as a people, we are nearer to a genial and willing acceptance of truth and obedience to the dictates of justice than appeared.

Still the conflict of principles endures in the world at large--the Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy, and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism, with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during the thirty years past; so, for the whole century gone by, the threatening cloud of the final conflict between the two great governing ideas in the world has been gathering. Occasional sharp and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage--not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently prevailed, and are we in truth prepared to investigate with sobriety, accept with simple honesty, and faithfully to practise the lessons of wisdom which the experience of the past or the new discoveries of the present or the future may bring? The religious world is becoming deeply penetrated with the conviction that we are, in the world at large, upon the verge of great events--that we are nearing the termination of an Old Dispensation and the commencement of a New; without, perhaps, defining very clearly, or attempting even to define distinctly to the imagination the nature of the change. The deepest philosophy of the age forecasts similar eventualities for an early day and for the whole earth. Thus it is that the investigation of The Great American Crisis, actual and urgent, might properly lead us up to the consideration of a Great World Crisis, impending and probable. On some other occasion it may be thought proper to give to this latter subject a distinct and more elaborate treatment. The object which we have proposed in the present series is now sufficiently accomplished, and the writer takes leave of the reader, with a profound conviction that to the anxious cry, What of the night? the answer, All is well, can be conscientiously returned. Even should the seemingly disastrous features sketched above in the alternative programme of our national future yet providentially reveal themselves in the scroll of our nation's history, let not the patriot or the lover of mankind for a moment despair. It will be but the intensified darkness preceding the light--the crisis of a deep-seated disease prognosticating health. The destiny of America is the destiny of man; and that is, that we come soon into the inheritance of new glories--an unlimited development and prosperity, founded on Religion married to Science, eventuating in the reconciliation of Order and Progression, in Universal Justice, and in the elevation, protection, mutual coöperation and happiness of all.

THISTLE-DOWN.

Pale and fleecy, ghosty and white, Onward borne in their unknown flight-- Flimsy and fragile, pure and fair-- Mystic things the thistles are.

Drifting about on a windy day-- Ghosty children at their play-- Revelling up above the trees, Hither and thither on the breeze.

Slow and sadly, how they fly, Chasing shadows in the sky! Never resting, never still, Through the valley, o'er the hill.

Walking round o'er the churchyard mould, Up above the bosoms cold; Flitting past each marble door, Sadly breathing: 'Gone before!'

Spectres _wild_ with their viewless steeds, Riding on where nothing leads; Up to the sky when the earth gets brown-- _Ever restless_ thistle-down.

Through the forest cool and dark, Never hitting the destined mark; Over the earth and through the air, Downy thistles _everywhere_.

Darting in at the open door, Telling of joys that come no more; Robed in grave clothes fine and thin-- Shades of phantoms, ever dim.

Up the church-aisles Sabbath-days, Where the dusky twilight plays; Round the altar, o'er the bier, Preaching _more than priests do here_.

Solemn are the words they say-- _Silent sermons free of_ PAY; And the _lessons_ they impart, _Never vanish from the heart_.

THE LOVE LUCIFER.

[The author of 'The Love Lucifer' says in regard to it: 'I enclose a narration of _facts_. Not noted for assurance, I yet feel well assured that its publication in THE CONTINENTAL 'will do uses.'' Should there be any among our readers who have inquired into our modern necromancy, they will not fail to recognize in the excited, wild, incoherent, and uncultured jargon of the spirits of 'The Love Lucifer,' the same style and character evinced by those to whom they may have been introduced by the 'mejums.' The two Bulwers, the Howitts, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Halls, the De Morgans, &c., have taken a deep interest in these half-comic, half-serious, and always incoherent demonstrations.

Perhaps the matter-of-fact experience of our author may shield some of our readers from 'obsessions, delusions, magnetic streams of Od,' be they angelic, human, demoniac, or Koboldic in their origin.--_Ed. Con._]