uresque, and
sometimes lets in a deep analogy. But the hour in which Mr. Conway
writes, the height of faith from which his pen stoops to the mortal
page, the unspeakable solemnity of the theme, which our volunteers are
rudely striving to trace upon their country's bosom with their blood,
and our women are steeping in their tears, ought to drive all flippancy
shuddering from the lines in which sarcasm itself should be measured and
awful as the deaths which gird us round.

But the two volumes are full of power and feeling. They are written
so that all may read. Their effect is popular, without stooping
deliberately to become so. They are among the brightest and simplest
pages which this exciting period has produced. It would be a great
mistake to gauge their effect by what they bring to pass in the minds of
cabinet-officers, editors, and party-leaders: for they put into plain,
stout language the growing instinct of the people to get at the cause of
the war which lays them waste.

Some of the most effective pages in these volumes are those which lament
the dread alternative of war, and which show that emancipation would be
merciful to all classes at the South. It is no paradox that to free the
slaves to-morrow would restore health to the South and regenerate its
people.

And we are glad that Mr. Conway speaks so emphatically against that
measure of colonization, whether the proposition be to deport the
contrabands to Hayti, or to tote them away to Central America under the
leadership of intelligent colored representatives of the North. All
these are plans which look to the eventual removal of the only men
at the South who know how to labor, and who are now the only
representatives there of the country's industrial ideas. We pray you,
Mr. President, to use the money voted for colonizing purposes to rid the
country of the men in the Border and Cotton States who cannot or will
not work, slave-owners and bushwhackers, who kill and harry, but who
never did an honest stroke of work in their lives, and whom, with or
without slavery, this Republic will have to support. Take some Pacific
Island for a great Alms-House, and inaugurate an exodus of the genuine
Southern pauper; he is only an incumbrance to the industrious and
humble-minded blacks, from whose toil the country may draw the staples
of free sugar and free cotton, raised upon the soil which is theirs by
the holy prescription of blood and sorrow. "If it were not for your