tution of slavery and the riots which
occasionally disgrace our large cities. For in the light of the facts
and experience of to-day, such a position is simply a yielding of the
whole question. When it is considered that the few riots with which we
are afflicted--few in comparison with those which so often convulse
European society--are almost invariably incited and sustained by our
foreign population, and that portion of it, too, latest arrived upon our
shores, it will be seen with what injustice the evil is laid at the door
of American society. It is, in fact, nothing else than the outbreak of
the long-accumulated and long-suppressed discontent and misery of
European lands, which, for the first time for centuries, finds vent upon
the shores of a land of political and social liberty--a reaction of the
springs long held down by the iron hand of tyranny--a violent
restoration of that natural elasticity which had so nearly been
destroyed by ages of social degradation. The mob law, the frequent
resort to the pistol and the bowie knife, and the universal social
recklessness of our own citizens of the Southern States, is the effect
of the institution of slavery, and falls within the discussion of that
question, with the disappearance of which they must inevitably depart.

Were African slavery a permanent feature in our midst, the argument
against our civilization would be unanswerable. But it has maintained
its ground in spite of, rather than as the result of or in connection
with the spirit of our institutions. It has hitherto been suffered to
exist as an acknowledged evil, solely because the disastrous results
attending its sudden abolition have been justly feared as greater than
any which could at present arise from its continuance. Yet at no period
has the American people ceased to look forward to some future time when
it might safely be rooted out. Our faith has ever been strong, and our
confidence in the ultimate triumph of the right unshaken. That time has
come. The present war, from whose inauguration the question of slavery
abolition was--on our part, at least--entirely absent, has given the
opportunity which our people have not failed to seize. To crush out the
rebellion without meddling with the institutions of the South was at
first the main spring of the war; _fiat justitia, ruat coelum_, is now
the voice of the whole people; and the very fact that the nation has so
earnestly taken hold of the work, so sternly de