inies of a
great principle and a great people. Courage! You have to resist your
friends and to face your foes; it is the fate of all who seek to do good
on earth. Courage! You will have need of it to-morrow, in a year, to the
end; you will have need of it in peace and in war; you will have need of
it to avert the compromise in peace or war of that noble progress which
it is your charge to accomplish, more than in conquests of slavery.
Courage! your role, as you have said, may be inferior to no other, not
even to that of Washington: to raise up the United States will not be
less glorious than to have founded them.

It is doubtless from a distance that we express these sympathies, but
there are things which are judged better from a distance than near at
hand. Europe is well situated to estimate the present crisis. The
opinion of France, especially, should have some weight with the United
States: independently of our old alliances, we are, of all nations,
perhaps, the most interested in the success of the Confederation. They
are friendly voices which, here and elsewhere, in our reviews and our
journals, bear to it the cordial expression of our wishes. In wishing
the final triumph of the North, we wish the salvation of the North and
South, their common greatness and their lasting prosperity.

But the South disquiets us; we cannot disguise it. It is in bad hands. A
sort of terror reigns there; important but moderate men are forced to
bow the head, or to feel that it will be necessary to do so ere long.
The planters must see already that, in seeking to put away what they
call the yoke of the North, they are preparing for themselves other
masters. Business is suspended, money for cultivation is lacking, credit
is everywhere refused, the ensuing harvest is mortgaged, the loans which
it is sought to issue find no takers outside the extreme South. The
resources of revolution remain, and they will be used unsparingly.

What a position! Under the Constitution voted scarcely a month ago, we
already hear the deep rumbling of the quarrels of classes, of the
planters and the poor whites, of the aristocracy and the numerical
majority, of the prudent adversaries of the slave trade and its
headstrong partisans, of the statesmen who are tolerated for appearances
and those who count on replacing them, of the present and the future.

People will some day see clearly, even in Charleston. The separation
which was to establish the prosperity