ave done. We have been generous, we have been
merciful--we have protected property, we have returned slaves, we have
let our wounded lie in the open air and die rather than offend the
fiendish-hearted women of Secessia--and what have we got by it? Lies and
lies, again and yet again. For refusing to touch the black, Mr. Lincoln
is termed by the Southern press 'a dirty negro-stealer,' and our troops,
for _not_ taking the slaves and thereby giving the South all its present
crop and for otherwise aiding them, are simply held up as hell-hounds
and brigands. Much we have made by forbearance!

The miserable position held by Free State secessionists, Breckinridge
Democrats, rose-water conservatives, and other varieties of the great
Northern branch of Southern treason, is fully exemplified by the
following extract from Breckinridge's special organ, the Louisville
_Courier_, printed while Nashville was still under rebel rule, an
article which has been of late more than once closely reechoed and
imitated by the Richmond _Whig_.

'This,' says the _Courier_, 'has been called a fratricidal war by
some, by others an irrepressible conflict between freedom and
slavery. We respectfully take issue with the authors of both these
ideas. We are not the brothers of the Yankees, and the slavery
question is merely the _pretext, not the cause of the war_. The
true irrepressible conflict lies fundamentally in the hereditary
hostility, the sacred animosity, the eternal antagonism, between
the two races engaged.

'The Norman cavalier can not brook the vulgar familiarity of the
Saxon Yankee, while the latter is continually devising some plan to
bring down his aristocratic neighbor to his own detested level.
Thus was the contest waged in the old United States. So long as
_Dickinson dough-faces were to be bought_, and _Cochrane cowards to
be frightened_, so long was the Union tolerable to Southern men;
but when, owing to divisions in our ranks, the Yankee hirelings
placed one of their own spawn over us, political connection became
unendurable, and separation necessary to preserve our
_self-respect_.

'As our Norman friends in England, always a minority, have ruled
their Saxon countrymen in political vassalage up to the present
day, so have we, the slave oligarchs, governed the Yankees till
within a twelve-month. We framed the Constitution,