ed, a factor in favour
of the disease. We have seen this exemplified in the course of the
present war. The mere delay in the punishment of certain gross outrages
against the moral traditions of Europe has made those outrages seem just
a little less horrible than they seemed at first, so that men can even
bear to contemplate a peace by which their authors should escape
punishment--a thing which would have been impossible while the anger of
decent men retained its virginity. So it was with Slavery. Accepted at
first as an unquestionable blot on American Democracy, but one which
could not at the moment be removed, it came gradually to seem something
normal. A single illustration will show the extent of this decline in
moral sensitiveness. In the first days of the Republic Jefferson, a
Southerner and a slave-owner, could declare, even while compromising
with Slavery, that he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God was just, could use of the peril of a slave insurrection this fine
phrase: "The Almighty has no attribute that could be our ally in such a
contest." Some sixty years later, Stephen Douglas, as sincere a democrat
as Jefferson, and withal a Northerner with no personal interest in
Slavery, could ask contemptuously whether if Americans were fit to rule
themselves they were not fit to rule "a few niggers."

The next factor to be noticed was that to which Jefferson referred in
the passage quoted above--the constant dread of a Negro rising. Such a
rising actually took place in Virginia in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. It was a small affair, but the ghastly massacre of
whites which accompanied it was suggestive of the horrors that might be
in store for the South in the event of a more general movement among the
slaves. The debates which this crisis produced in the Virginian
legislature are of remarkable interest. They show how strong the feeling
against Slavery as an institution still was in the greatest of Slave
States. Speaker after speaker described it as a curse, as a permanent
peril, as a "upas tree" which must be uprooted before the State could
know peace and security. Nevertheless they did not uproot it. And from
the moment of their refusal to uproot it or even to make a beginning of
uprooting it they found themselves committed to the opposite policy
which could only lead to its perpetuation. From the panic of that moment
date the generality of the Slave Codes which so many of the Souther