o the South. It implies that her conscience is debauched
by self-interest, and that by offering to remunerate her if she will
part with what we call her ill-gotten booty we shall assist her to
become virtuous. Such a proposal makes her feel that fanaticism has
assumed the calmness which is its most hopeless symptom."

"Then," said he, "is the North to change all its opinions?"

I said, "If this implies the abandonment of moral or religious principle
in the least degree, Never. Our only hope lies in our possibly being in
the wrong, and in magnanimously changing our views and feelings, and our
behavior. This, upon conviction, it will be most noble to do for its own
sake, leaving the effect of it to Him by whom actions are weighed, and
to those who, we shall have concluded, are naturally as magnanimous and
just as we, and who, if guilty of oppression, were liable to the very
same accusation when we first confederated with them, and when Northern
slave-importers put their hands with Southern slave-holders to the
Declaration of Independence, both averring that all men are created free
and equal.

"We seem now to have concluded that we have put ourselves entirely
right, and that our Southern brethren are entirely wrong."

"I cannot feel," said Mr. North, "that we are to blame for having our
opinions, and for expressing them honestly and fearlessly. What more
have we done?"

I replied, "They say that we have held them up to universal execration;
that we have quoted, with readiness, the testimony of foreign nations
against them,--of nations who know nothing of domestic slavery like
ours, mixed up with the qualifying influences of our own civilization;
that our imaginative literature has made them odious, associating
cruelty and vulgarity with the relation of slave-holding; that we have
labored to cripple their Institution, hoping to destroy it; that we have
striven to save the District of Columbia from their system as from
corruption; that a thousand millions of dollars of their property we
have treated as contraband, and have made it perilous for them to
recover it; that we have lain in wait and molested them in their transit
through our borders, with their servants, to embark for sea. We dispute
their right to go with their servants into territories jointly acquired,
and belonging by constitutional right equally to them as to ourselves.
This, they say, has not been a just and sincere demand for an equitable
division of t