any way be applied, should not have foreseen that such a scheme must be unsuccessful, only presents one more illustration of that, of which the people of England have had many in their own history, the moral Myopism, to which the habit of almost constantly looking down and never up at mankind, always predisposes. That the true people of the United States could have allowed the mutiny to proceed so far, before rising in their strength to resist it, is due chiefly to the instructive reliance which every grumbler really gets to have under our forms of society in the ultimate common-sense of the great body of the people, and to the incredulity with which the report has been regarded, that slavery had made such a vast difference between the character of the South and that of the country at large. Few were fully convinced that the whole proceedings of the insurgents meant anything else than a more than usually bold and scandalous way of playing the game of brag, to which we had been so long used in our politics, and of which the people of England had a little experience shortly before the passage of a certain Reform Bill. The instant effect of the first shotted-gun that was fired proves this. We knew then that we had to subjugate slavery, or be subjugated by it.
Peace is now not possible until the people of the South are well convinced that the form of society, to fortify which is the ostensible purpose of the war into which they have been plunged, is not worthy fighting for, or until we think the sovereignty of our convictions of Justice, Freedom, Law and the conditions of Civilization in this land to be of less worth than the lives and property of our generation.
From the St. Lawrence to the Mexican Gulf, freedom must everywhere give way to the necessities of slavery, or slavery must be accommodated to the necessary incidents of freedom.
