Heaven? Would not the very soil of America,
in which Liberty is said to inhere, cry out and rise against any but an
affirmative answer to such questions?

A near future will decide.

* * * * *

THE HOUR AND THE MAN.

The Twenty-Second of September, 1862, bids fair to become as remarkable
a date in American history as the Fourth of July, 1776; for on that day
the President of the United States, availing himself of the full powers
of his position, declared this country free from that slaveholding
oligarchy which had so long governed it in peace, and the influence of
which was so potently felt for more than a year after it had broken up
the Union, and made war upon the Federal Government. Be the event what
it may,--and the incidents of the war have taught us not to be too
sanguine as to the results of any given movement,--President Lincoln has
placed the American nation in a proper attitude with respect to that
institution the existence of which had so long been the scandal and
the disgrace of a people claiming to be the freest on earth, but whose
powers had been systematically used and abused for the maintenance and
the extension of slave-labor.

It was our misfortune, and in some sense it was also our fault, that we
were bound to uphold the worst system of slavery that ever was known
among men; for we must judge of every wrong that is perpetrated by the
circumstances that are connected with it, and our oppression of the
African race was peculiarly offensive, inasmuch as it was a proceeding
in flagrant violation of our constantly avowed principles, was continued
in face of the opinions of the founders of the nation, was frankly
upheld on the unmanly ground that the intellectual weakness of the
slaves rendered it safe to oppress them, and was not excused by that
general ignorance of right which has so often been brought forward in
palliation of wrong,--as slavery had come under the ban of Christendom
years before Americans could be found boldly bad enough to claim for it
a divine origin, and to avow that it was a proper, and even the best,
foundation for civil society. Our offence was of the rankest, and its
peculiar character rendered us odious in the eyes of the nations, who
would not admit the force of our plea as to the great difficulties that
lay in the way of the removal of the evil, as they had seen it condemned
by most communities, and abolished by some of their number.

T