persecution, exile, and death, and untold
privations worse than death. O you who would bring discredit on the
memory and name of the Puritans, recall this noblest era of time; rise
for one hour, if your souls have any wings, to the height of this
grandeur, and bid calumny and defamation be dumb!

This germ of republican freedom took deep root, and acquired an
ineradicable hold of their civil polity, and the whole machinery of
their civil government; and, spreading from New England to the adjoining
colonies, and from these to others, soon permeated the whole
confederation, at length forming the basis of a national government, a
national condition which has heretofore represented the highest
civilization of the world.

Is it not plain, then, _why_ they do so, who oppose and hate the
influence and ideas of New England? If anything could measure the utter
vileness of slavery and its degrading effect on the mind, it would be
the consideration of the unblushing assurance with which its lovers
defend it, and at the same time assail those sacred principles which lie
at the root of our national life, and without which we are dead and
cumbering the ground. Our nation holds _in trust_ certain principles,
for the successful carrying out of which the nations of the earth wait
in hushed and anguished expectancy, and in the failure of which we
should be no better than any of the effete, defunct peoples of buried
ages; or, rather, in the failure to bring them to a triumphant
vindication, we had far better be as Sodom and Gomorrah. These
principles are now the stake for which the loyal men of the land are
gladly offering up life, treasure, children, _all_, so they but win.

We hear a great deal, nowadays, from rebel sources, of the different
race which settled Virginia and Carolina from that which peopled New
England, and the immeasurable superiority of the former. If the
mouthpiece of the confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis, may be believed, the
latter and their descendants are not worthy even to be the _slaves_ of
the former, and are a degree lower in the scale of creation than the
_hyenas_! Differing in language, manners, customs, ideas, there is no
possibility of a peaceable union, say the confederate organs. In fine,
language is exhausted of epithets expressive of their scorn, contempt,
and hatred of the _Yankees_, as they are opprobriously nicknamed. But do
these men ignore the fact that the original settlers of both New England
a