emblematic picture for her State House. Jefferson Davis was requested to act with the South Carolina committee in criticising the studies for this design. The first sketch brought in by the artist was a design representing the North by various mechanic implements, the West by something else, whilst the South was represented by various things, the centrepiece, however, being a cotton-bale with a negro upon it, fast asleep. When Jeff saw it he said, "Gentlemen, this will never do: what will become of the South when that negro wakes up?"

The first blast from the trump of universal Freedom will reveal to Jeff and his Confederates that the negro has already waked up; also, which is more important, that the North is waked up; then will our army go marching on to bloodless victory, - trampling scourges, not men, breaking fetters, not hearts.

Ah, what tongue can celebrate a victory so glorious; a victory which would restore to our firesides the lost links of their circles; which would touch the blighted lands of the South as by a magic wand, until its desert should rejoice and blossom as the rose; which should clasp the broken arch between North and South with the infrangible keystone, eternal Justice!

VIII

THE GRADUAL PLAN

A BOHEMIAN story relates that Horace Greeley was lately travelling on a steamer, when a High-Church Episcopalian minister, who was on board, became much exercised concerning his (Greeley's) soul. At length this clergyman approached H. G., and, in a solemn voice, said, " Friend, may I inquire if you have ever been baptized?" "Well,

no," replied Greeley, "not exactly; but I've been vaccinated."

Gradual emancipation has about as much to do with putting down this rebellion through Slavery as vaccination has with baptism.

The war power alone gives the President the right even to touch Slavery in the States with his little finger, as he has done; and the military advantage which he sees and assigns as a reason for his late proposition to coöperate in emancipation with slave States is sufficient to justify abolition by the war power.

It is thus one of the commander-in-chief's guns; and to make it gradual would be like firing off a gun a little at a time, if that were possible.

So far as emancipation will help us to crush this rebellion, no gradual plan which was ever conceived and tried can do us the least good. Any measure which leaves the slave bound at all to his Southern master, keeps him there adding to the wealth and support and military power of the hostile section. And if four millions of these labourers remain to furnish these supplies to the enemy, the South will be able to keep in the field all their white population, and whatever advantages we may gain, their rebellion will survive the youngest person in this nation.

But looking at the matter apart from the national emergency, and simply as a question of political economy, to say that gradual emancipation is better for all is to throw away all the light of experience in this matter. Negro slaves have within this century been emancipated in seven or eight countries. And if there is one thing in which all reports agree, it is that wherever the thing was done in any half way, the country suffered in exports and imports; wherever it was done cleanly, immediately, and

unconditionally, the country never failed to reap a full and immediate reward. Whilst the island of Jamaica, under the gradual plan, groaned under its losses, the adjacent islands which made a clean sweep of Slavery saw their five talents at once swell to ten. Russia is now undergoing the same experience with its serfs, who, kept in limbo between Slavery and Liberty, have proved such a burden that the taskmasters are crying out to the Czar to have them given equal rights or none at all.

Homer nodding. I allude to the Rev. Homer Wilbur, of the "Atlantic Monthly." Many a noble refrain of freedom, which lingers in our hearts in the watches of the night, which greets the rising day, must be traced to this Homer; but lately it would seem that his Muse threatens to reverse the story of Undine, and gradually lose her soul. What else can be said concerning his Polliwog fable? This fable compares those who would declare Slavery at an end, so far as this government is concerned, to those philotadpoles who, impatient at the slow growth by which Nature leads polliwog to frog, insisted on cutting off the tails of the former. After this Homer writes: “I would do nothing hastily or vindictively, nor presume to jog the elbow of Providence. No desperate measures for me till we are sure that all others are hopeless,flectere si nequeo SUPEROS, Acheronta movebo."

In other words, the slaughter at Manassas, Ball's Bluff, Winchester, Shiloh are mild measures; these are appeals to the gods; but to release millions from dungeons, fetters, auction blocks, and raise them to life, this is a "desperate measure," this is to "move hell"!

Is it possible that any cataract should have been so far formed over this once clear eye that it now sees a state of Slavery to be a normal phase in the condition of human

beings? O Homer, once you sang as if you saw that Slavery, and not emancipation, was the murderous lopping off of the poor polliwog's tail!

So far as the principle,

From lower to the higher next,

Not to the top, is Nature's text,

is concerned, it is certainly true. Only, to apply it in the present case as against immediate emancipation gives an odd suggestion of a Sleepy Hollow somewhere near Cambridge. Does Homer remember nothing of the long and fearful years in which we have gone - God knows how wearily and slowly-from step to step up to this our Commencement Day? To speak of emancipation now as hasty, or a leap over essential steps, is as if Homer should go to the next Senior who, having made his graduation speech at the end of a full College course, is about to receive his diploma, and say: "My dear young man, festina lente! You must n't think of a diploma until you have been here four years yet. Come over, -our Ollendorf class meets at ten now."

Or here, say, is an old tree which has been slowly rotting, until a breath only may bring it to the earth; now, merely because it falls with a crash, and the splinters fly, shall we accuse the blithe breeze which did the work of being a revolutionary tornado, moving Acheron?

Let us trust that Providence will "presume to jog the elbow" of Homer, that he may no longer nod whilst the first page in God's account with America is closing, and when it is plain that upon the virtue and earnestness of the current hour it must depend whether there shall be any balance in favour of this nation to be carried to the fresh page, or to entitle it to further trust.

IX

WAR FOR THE UNION

WE are told, with a frequency and vehemence which so simple a proposition could scarcely be supposed to evoke, that "this is a war for the Union." We can account for the vehemence by the supposition that this sentence has a reverse side, which is, that "this is not a war for emancipation."

We do not need a war for emancipation. Slavery is the creature of positive law; it is maintainable only by systematic force. Only withdraw the positive supports of Slavery, only let the government declare that it will henceforth ignore the relation of master and slave, — and Slavery falls by its own weight.

But has not this idea of a "war for the Union" its comic side? I once knew of a father's whipping his child because the child did not love him so well as it did its nurse, and it seemed to me an odd way to cultivate filial affection; but is it not so that we are recovering unity with the South? If that Union had not been already dead, surely we have sent artillery enough down there to have killed it several times. Whether we shall succeed with our arms or not, it would be a corpse that we conquered, galvanize it as we might. My theory of General McClellan is that he has just sense enough to see that, the object assigned being to restore the Union, the more he should fight the less Union he would have. He had probably concluded that harmony was more likely to come by his sitting on the Potomac and waiting for it to turn up; and he might have been sitting there still if the country had not been of a different opinion.