allegiance is still perfect, but whose rights are exactly what the supreme tribunal decides them to be. No State can affect so much of its existence as is derived from, and dependent upon, acts of the general government. It can destroy its own courts, but not its United States District Court. The United States is engaged in an unjustifiable war, if judged by any other theory than that the seceded States are in a state of anarchy; and anarchy is emancipation, because Slavery rests upon certain special (exclusively) State enactments, which being now withdrawn, it falls to the ground. If not, let some one show us why, of all peculiar and domestic institutions, such as the laws punishing as criminals anti-slavery men, and also those who teach negroes to read or write, -slave-ownership alone has an ark in which to survive the deluge. If this war is a real thing with us, our government is engaged in establishing laws and their forms in places where all laws have been overthrown, with all the rights and wrongs held under them: universal law it may establish there, but not local law; and if Slavery exists any more in such localities, it will be by an act of this government, as purely arbitrary and infamous as if it imported so many slaves from Africa. For the United States occupying Virginia to establish there the local laws and institutions which had existed in that State, any more than those of New York is ultra vires. The United States not only has no such authority, but in the present case to recognize the relation of master and slave in the South is simply to follow in the fearful furrows of civil war, and sow them with the winds whose harvests shall be whirlwinds such as we are to-day reaping. To all the technical objections offered to this position, -based on the idea of Centralization, the twin error with State sovereignty, which hold that a State cannot violate its compact with the general government, the law replies with its maxim, Via facti, via juris. But however important these views may be, the argument for Emancipation need not rest upon them: indeed, so systematically have the negroes been kept from the means of knowing their rights, that their liberty must rise upon them, clear and unmistakable, like a sunrise. We need, then, an edict without reservation declaring that this government recognizes all men in this country as free. This edict may come from two sources: I. Congress may declare Slavery abolished 1. By the power (Art. I, § 8) to provide for the common defence and general welfare. 2. By the duty (Art. IV, § 4) assigned the government, to guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government. When Congress has the manliness to see, what it requires ingenuity not to see, that the common defence is weakened and the general welfare impaired by the existence of Slavery in this country, it is under oath to abolish that system, under the first of these clauses. When it has the common sense to see that Slavery and the rebellion are united as cause and effect, and recognizes the normal hostility of Slavery towards the ballot-box, -i. e. to the republican form of government it is pledged to maintain in every State, it is sworn no longer to harbor it in the country. It is not to the point to say that the majority of the States which adopted the Constitution held slaves. Law is, essentially, the higher nature of man enthroned over his lower. Criminals are every day punished by laws which they pay to sustain, and acknowledge to be just and authentic. Many slaveholders voted for the principle that "all men are created equal." This question is to be considered apart from the practice of the States and individuals who made our Constitution, as much as apart from their religious persuasions. The compromise which our fathers made with Slavery was not the one-sided affair which some new schools would have us believe. They gave protection to the system as long as it should last; but, on the other part, they gained the power over it which such protection implies. The abolition of Slavery by Congress requires no amendment of the Constitution, simply because there is no word in the compact securing that institution from the natural effect of legislation for the general welfare. Consequently, its extinction is committed to the growth of opinion, and may be reached at any moment when the judgment of Congress shall enact that henceforth the clauses relating to "persons held to service" shall be held as applicable only to minors and apprentices. The fact that these clauses, when adopted, were meant to protect Slavery, along with the liability of minors and apprentices, is balanced by the fact that its specific mention was left out for the very purpose of rendering its tenure insecure. But the strictest constructionist, or the most sensitive traditionalist, will admit at once that the Slavery-institution to which our fathers gave a quasi-protection in the Constitution is quite a different thing from the Slaveryinstitution which it is now proposed to abolish. Slavery establishing the ballot-box over its own head is a different thing from Slavery trampling on the ballot-box. Slavery helping to rear a republican government is a different institution from that which comes with murderous weapon to strike it out of existence. The truth is, it is a doomed institution. Our fathers pronounced sentence on it, giving it the benefit of clergy, whereof it has availed itself to the last stretch of grace. The day and deed of execution they assigned to their posterity. From us it may get a reprieve; but a pardon, never! II. The President of the United States, as Commanderin-Chief of our Army and Navy, may abolish Slavery under Martial Law. This is a purely military power, and consequently Congress cannot, under the war power, abolish Slavery. Congress, may, however, impeach the President, if, to the detriment of the Republic, he should refuse to do this. The war power being legitimated by the Constitution, its edicts are constitutional law until repealed by due process of legislation, remaining in force after the exigency which evoked them is past. The slaves of rebels in the department lately under J. C. Frémont are legally, as under martial law he declared them, free men; and should any one of them sue for liberty, he could only be surrendered to his master by a decision that the President's modification of Mr. Frémont's proclamation was a military order of reënslavement, superseding ordinary process of law. They are either free men or the President has, for military reasons, sent them to the dungeon of Slavery, as he has sent political prisoners to Fort Warren. It is an error to suppose that, if the slaves were declared free by the Commander-in-Chief, the effect of such proclamation would pass away when the rebellion was suppressed. The President might, during the war, and under the power which had emancipated them, reënslave them, — holding himself ready, in both cases, to show the military reasons for his action. He is supposed to act by necessity. But except by such military necessity and power, he could not revoke his proclamation. It would be law until unmade by Congress. Equally is it an error to suppose that any State would be able, after the liberation of slaves by the United States, to reënslave them. Whilst the government recognizes as slaves those who are so by birth and by fact, yet for a State to enslave a man whom even its own laws have pronounced free would be contrary to the article of the Constitution which secures every "person" from being arbitrarily deprived of life, liberty, or property; but that slaves liberated by the laws of the United States could not be made slaves by any State is manifest from Art. VI of the Constitution, which declares: "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." IV MILITARY NECESSITY IT is claimed that the military general is the judge of what military necessity requires. The military general is the judge of the methods by which certain movements are to be accomplished. It is |