Page:Two Years of Church Progress.djvu/31

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floundered. We have reasons for believing that this unwonted moderation of tone is not confined to the productions of the President, but that it pervades the entire system of the Southern government, free as it is at last from the pressure of Northern mobs. If we examine the constitution of the Confederacy, we are confronted with instances of the spirit of conservative moderation which guided those statesmen who met in Montgomery to mould it upon that of the old United States. We have already pointed to the prohibition of the slave-trade which it contains. It also enacts that the tenure of the Presidentship shall be for six instead of four years, but without the premium on intrigue which the possibility of re-election involved. It gives ministers a seat and a voice on the floor of the Legislature, instead of isolating them in their offices, and handing the advocacy of ministerial measures over to private members clandestinely retained. It cuts off the most fruitful sources of corruption in declaring the permanence of all but the highest offices, and in limiting the objects to which Confederate taxes can be applied; thus, at one blow, abolishing that frightful system of universal electoral corruption, which had eaten into the very vitals of the United States. The union of feeling and corporate self-devotion which distinguishes the millions of the Southern States under the heavy privations of their isolated condition, may be laid to war excitement; their singular moderation and modesty cannot be. Ameliorations, like these, of language, and tone, and constitution so suddenly revealed, indicate an under-seam of goodness of which we must hitherto have been ignorant, while New York and Boston had constituted themselves the intermediaries of England and the South, mutually aggravating and misrepresenting the one and the other.

We have before us some remarkable American evidence on this head in a sermon which a clergyman of the diocese of Maryland, the Rev. E. J. Stearns, had the courage to deliver in the city of Newark in New Jersey (an almost suburb of New York) on the Fast Day, which President Lincoln appointed on the 26th of September, and for which he seems to have been all but prosecuted by the United States' district attorney. This preacher, speaking for himself, says, 'To me who know both parts of the country thoroughly, who know that while each has its virtues, each its faults, nine-tenths of all the divorces, nine-tenths of all the bribery of electors and legislators is at the North,' etc. The South, κατὰ κώμας οίκουμένη, may be dull beside Boston, sluggish beside New York,