cted
thus: 'North of 36 deg. 30' whooping-cough is prohibited, measles are
forbidden, cholera-morbus is forever interdicted.' They regard
slave-holders as living in a moral pestilence, and seeking to carry it
with them into new districts.

"But, practically," I said, "the thing will now regulate itself, and
both sides are contending very much for an abstract right. It is a war
of feeling, and no one knows where it will end. If the North would say,
'Free labor, which cannot thrive where slavery exists, requires an
amicable division and allotment of the territorial regions; let us agree
where our respective systems shall prevail,'--there would be no
difficulty. But the effort has been to shut out slavery, as men use
sanitary legislation and quarantine to keep out a pestilence. This is
treating fifteen States of the Union as polluted and polluting. Hence
they say, We cannot live together as one people, and we will not."

* * * * *

"What do you honestly think," said Mr. North, "is the true cause of our
present national calamities?"

"They are owing," said I, "originally, to the peculiar state of feeling
on the part of the North toward the South. This was not in consequence
of injury experienced; for slavery had not inflicted injury upon the
North; but, right or wrong, Northern disapprobation of slavery, and the
ways of manifesting it, are the fountain-head of our present national
trouble. Let great numbers in one section of such a nation as this
conscientiously disapprove of their brethren in another section, and not
only so, but hold them guilty of an immoral and an inhuman system, and
deal with them in such ways as Conscience, that most merciless of
inquisitors and persecutors, alone employs, and if the indicted section
be not exasperated, it will be because the accusation is true,--that
their system has destroyed their manhood."

"But my hope and belief," said he, "are, that all these changes are to
result in the overthrow of slavery."

"I can only say," said I, in answer to such a remark, "that he who
expects relief from our trouble through the eradication of slavery, and
urges on secession and division as the means to effect it, is in danger
of having his enthusiasm counted as fanaticism, if not madness."

"How I wish," said he, "that we could join and buy up these slaves and
set them free."

"Kind and well meant as this proposal is," said I, "nothing is really
more offensive t