fluence in the
Government.

'Ah, but,' says the Northern traitor, 'that very _abolition_ has done
the whole mischief. If there had been no Abolitionists, there would have
been no war. The _Abolitionists_ are responsible for it all.' Softly,
poor, weak-minded man! Does not any man's common sense tell him that
wherever a wrong exists, it is in the nature of things that somebody
should oppose it--that a desire should arise to get rid of it? It is the
_chief_ mercy of God to the world, next to His providing salvation for
it, that this _conscience_ is left to it, this sense of wrong, and the
will and struggle to abolish the wrong. For such remonstrance the
Abolitionists are indeed responsible!

There are certain words that have come to be used in an indefinite,
canting sort of way, so that they have no meaning at all, or, at least,
a meaning very deceptive. These words represent bugbears to unthinking
people, and unscrupulous men do not fail to pervert this fact to their
own or party ends. Such are some of the terms which have been applied to
New England, both South and North. She is called _radical_, and a most
absurd and mischievous idea of New England radicalism is rife,
especially in the South. Said a Southern gentleman to me on one occasion
(he was a physician, was one of the most intelligent slaveholders I ever
met, and was an occasional contributor to De Bow's _Review_):

'You New Englanders do not believe anything; you are all
freethinkers--is it not so?'

_Par parenthese_, that word _freethinker_ is another of the terms
conventionally abused. This gentleman had just been speaking of this
very thing, New England radicalism, and in his query showed an evident
idea that it involved that species of unbelief, that discarding of all
creeds or standards of belief, popularly known as _freethinking_. It
also includes, in the minds of many of the Southern people, the exercise
of a kind of personal license, an abandoning of the good old established
landmarks of thought and action, and a strong-minded striking out into
new paths of experiment, regardless of form or law. A Northern woman
going to the South is assumed to be _strong-minded_, especially, till
she has proved herself _feminine_. There is nothing so absurd as this
idea, when one considers that there is no people on earth as free,
independent, and original, intellectually, as they are, who possess so
deep and abiding a respect and veneration for those sam