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tions of liberty and life. Intemperance should not be accused intemperately, nor should one kind of intemperance be intemperately berated above all others. The temperate are few. No island of the sea has been found so savage but its people had some spirit stimulant to break the monotony of life. It is a very broad political assumption that the high-strung nerves of civilization should be forced to refrain. Limiting the sale of spirits, granting exclusive rights to sell, makes not one drunkard less, while it fosters the notion of monopoly. It is an insoluble problem, old as the race.—When we have observed that all legal devices to restrict drinking have amounted to about nothing reducing neither the appetite nor the means of gratifying it, if the radicals will for one moment fancy that we knew beforehand that they would amount to nothing their rancor at our conceptions of license may abate some little of its bitterness. Always they seem to believe there is no restraining force in man; that law alone withholds him from the demoniac,—that the mass has a virtue which the individuals have not—they being deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

The positions of the democracy during the stages of the anti-slavery agitation show plainly how their cool and judicious spirit has been aspersed as heartless and obstructive. Slavery was a great and grievous evil: no good man ever called it less. It was a bond upon the body, knotted in the mind, and it duly called down the horror of a crescent civilization. While this sentiment was growing the democracy were maltreated for offering consolatory reflections: it was the interest of the planter to use his servants well; every man was a slave until his twenty-second year, etc. But the advocates of total depravity could see but one possible picture of the South: the slave groaning under the lash and his master lolling in luxury. Their sympathy was good, and we tacitly approved it, albeit it was no great credit to their tone that their anxiety was for the slave only—as if labor were the only evil, and the loss of position and luxury to those accustomed to them were a little matter. But when they drew the inference that because no man can have a right to hold another in serfdom the slave should be at once set free, we saw two sides to the doctrine, and were first to suggest that the planter should receive compensation for the loss of his inherited property. This hint fell into the radical pocket; and charity at the expense of others being more to their desire, the cry was changed: "Let the bounds of slave territory be restricted from further growth!"—This was not to make one slave the less, and being a purely political and partisan cry, we opposed it as insidious and unjust. Slavery had as much right to grow as it had to live; to limit its political territory was to soon overbear it, and leave it defenceless. Then came the Fugitive Slave law, and to the insuperable disgust of the agitators, the democracy approved it! A word or two about this:—

If there was ever a party at once just, cunning, and sagacious, it was of the northern democrats who favored that execrated measure. To hold that they sympathized with the master at the catching of his fugitive chattel would be to ask too much of human nature; but there was an ostensible justice in it, at the same time that it offered the only legal course to the destruction of slavery. The slave was the party aggrieved; the slave was the man who could legitimately de-chattelize himself; and those slaves who had the nerve and ingenuity to get away were the very firebrands to be sent back, fanned by the northern breeze, to fire the rest.

But abolitionists could not see it thus, and threatened from many quarters, the South at length with a national unanimity declared for secession. It was one of those epochal actions beyond all classification, and which only the event can presume to criticise, whether as patriotism or treason. The democracy as a rule did not strongly object, and were reluctantly drawn into the war for the union, accepting the logic of events. Whatever be the political credit of the war, republicans must have it; but upon all our positions and attitudes in regard to it the democracy revert complacently. It was a war without a song, watch-word or battle cheer. Never before was casus belli so phantasmal to the belligerents; never was so much courage attended with so little resentment; never a cause of which the prodigal forgiveness of the settlement so stultified the haste and fervor of the prosecution: like a great action for divorce, in which the lady wins, and then like a