t it die
quietly, without any attempt to pull the house down about its ears
and our own ears. This seems to us to be a very absurd sort of
impatience--prompted by giddy passion rather than sober reason.

'But how do we know slavery is dying? We know it from the unanimous
testimony of all personal observers of its condition. There is not
a man within the Union lines South, however friendly he may be to
the institution, who pretends that there is any chance whatever of
its being saved, _if present causes continue_. Two things are
killing it.

'_The first is the wear and tear of the war. Military operations
always tend to disjoint and break up, within their scope, all the
relations of society. They inevitably remit, to a greater or less
extent, the social man to a state of nature. Inter arma leges
silent_. This is felt in every social connection, even the closest
and strongest; for they all are, more or less, dependent on civil
law. But it must be felt particularly in that connection, which of
all others is the most forced and arbitrary--the connection between
master and slave. Liberty is a natural instinct. The caged bird is
not surer to fly through the parted wires than the slave, in his
ordinary condition, from the broken chain--_and the chain must be
broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes
away_. There are men who complain of the anti-slavery war policy of
the President. A policy that was anything else would not be a war
policy at all. The war upon the rebellious slaveholding people of
necessity involves an interruption of their laws; and unless the
advancing army should make good this absence of civil rule by
applying its own military power to keeping watch and ward over the
slaves, and thus abandon its proper military business, the result
is inevitable _that the institution must melt away as the war goes
on_. Abraham Lincoln might be as much attached to slavery as
Jefferson Davis himself, and yet no human sagacity would enable him
to fight Jefferson Davis honestly and effectually without mortal
injury to slavery. _It is the war which kills slavery, and not the
man who leads the war_.

'_The other destroying agency in open discussion_. Slavery can live
only in silence. There is a deadly antagonism between itself an