TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SECESSION POLICY IN COLLAPSE.
WE have as yet no confirmation of the startling rumour that President Davis, who proposed to rest his Govern- ment on the corner-stone of slavery, has decided to rest it instead on the corner-stone of abolition principles;—for, the en- rolment of an army of 500,000 slaves, each guaranteed his free- dom and a fifty-acre freehold, would mean practically the emancipation of all the slaves in the South. The families of half a million of men fit for war could not number much under two millions, and, of course, their emancipation and embodi- ment as soldiers would be impossible without the emancipation of the wives and children who are to live with them at the end of the war on the promised farms. Now, as there are probably not more than three million slaves left to the South, it would obviously be both impossible and foolish to attempt to keep "the balance" in slavery when the great majority had been set free. We may fairly assume, then, that if the rumour had any truth in it, it would involve the absolute reversal of the Southern policy, the final abandonment of slavery—the guarantee of freedom. We see that our Southern contemporary the Index gives serious credit to the rumour, and is inclined to claim the South at once as the great cham- pion of emancipation and freedom. Probably, therefore, Mr. Mason does not wholly reject it. But there are various very strong reasons for still regarding the rumour as a fable. In the first place, it would not only be a violent revolution in policy, for the very man who bribed the Cotton States into rebellion by a promise Of the extension of slavery, to sustain them in rebellion by extinguishing it,—but it would be a most violent political revolution also. There is no power given to the Southern President to deal with either the slaves or the land of the Confederate States at all. There is not only no power given to his Congress to do so, but by the Confederate constitution the Congress is absolutely prohibited from touch- ing slavery. By the ninth section of the first article of that constitution, "No law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed," and according to this report, therefore the President of the Southern States, after consulta- tion with a few of the governors of the various States in his Confederacy, has determined not only to reverse the only dis- tinctive principle of the new polity, but to violate the most express provisions of the constitution by sacrificing arbitrarily both the land and slaves of his own loyal fellow-countrymen. This would be to break faith flagrantly, therefore with all the States which he had decoyed into rebellion, by taking from them legal rights which the old Government never even menaced. We do not find it easy to give any credit at all to such a rumour without very much more authority than we have yet had for it. We conceive too, that were the decree true, its only effect would be to induce many of the Southern States at once to shake off Mr. Davis's authority, and compromise on any terms with the old Union. Of one thing we are sure, that any movement in this direction would determine the Border States once and for all to take a decisive part with the North,—that is, not only Kentucky, but Tennessee and North Carolina, where there are already abundant indications of the rise of a violent disgust towards the Confederate Govern- ment. We doubt very much, again, whether the slaves them- selves would be bribed even by this magnificent offer into siding with the power which has hanged and shot so many of their brethren simply for doing what they would then be invited to do, i.e., serving as soldiers on the side of the Government which had offered them freedom. They would have the game in their own hands, for no white army equally large would exist to control them; and they would probably prefer to trust for their freedom and their freeholds to Mr. Lincoln, who has always resisted the extension, and who a year ago struck a blow at the very existence of slavery, rather than to Mr. Davis, who organized a rebellion in order that slavery might range wider, strike deeper, and become altogether a more hopeless condition than before, and who bound himself and his legislature by solemn constitutional vows never to undermine it. • But however little credit may attach to the rumour, the mere fact that it is discussed among the desperate expedients to which the able and unprincipled statesmen of the Con- federacy may yet be tempted to resort ought to teach the dim-sighted and querulous English politicians, who have so long been shrieking out their parrot cry that the war is one which never had a justification and never can have any good result, how weak and futile is their judgment of the greatest, if the most inadequately interpreted, issue on which the citizens of the same commonwealth were ever divided. That the same men who justify,—and amply justify,—the promoters of our own great civil war, and find a Providential justice in it more than compensating us for its reciprocal cruelties, its onesided fanaticisms, and the fearful reaction into that "servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love" which it entailed,—that such men can look at the civil war on the American continent, and see in it nothing but pur- poseless bloodshed and wanton ambition, only shows, perhaps, how much easier it is to read the riddle of the past than that which is evolving itself in the present. But even the blindest ought to catch a glimpse, in such signs of the times as this rumour concerning the Confederate Government, of the work- ing of some greater purpose beneath this play of human pas- sions than it has been given to any war of modern days to work out. For however little basis of fact it may imply, it certainly does imply that a conviction is rapidly growing at the South that the new ship can only be saved, if at all, by throwing her whole cargo overboard,—that if there is any hope for Southern independence it can only be at the cost of every inducement which led to the demand for that inde- pendence. And consider for a moment by how strange a path we have reached this involuntary admission of the great Slave power that it is beginning to despair of its own dreams, and almost willing to become an instrument in giving them the final death-blow. It has approached by gigantic leaps, taken entirely of its own free will, the edge of the gulf into which it seems now about to plunge. The North has done nothing for half a century back but mete out liberally to it the rope by which at length it seems likely to hang itself.. If " resist not evil" had been the first principle of the Free States, they could not more thoroughly have acted upon it till within the last two years. The overwhelming danger which now menaces this Power with destruction has been more due to a blind fermentation of the leaven of liberty than to any voluntary and intelligent exercise of the faith in freedom. If this Power has even begun to talk of transforming slaves into freeholders, it is only the more wonderful testimony to the "divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will" that in so doing it is greatly outrunning the slow move- ment of its great enemy's thought. The docile Conservatism, nay, as we have sometimes been tempted to say, the almost half-witted Constitutionalism of the North has scarcely even yet clearly realized the broad principle of the battle it is now fighting. It made everyconceivable concession rather than fight it at all, broke down its own chosen barriers, gave up its own favourite compromises, yielded to every fresh encroachment, offered bribes even after the last indignity, and almost im- plored the South with suppliant hands not to force it to battle for the freedom of an alien race. And yet, in spite of all this, —nay, probably in consequence of it, for if checked sooner and more firmly the South would never have rushed headlong into the present cal de sac,—we now find both North and. South competing for the adhesion of the injured race, and the negroes themselves in apparent possession of the weight which will turn the balance of power in favour of either com- batant. And yet people cry out,—because one English pro- vince is suffering terribly and all English trade is in a pet at the commercial deadlock,—that the war is wanton and pur- poseless, and must be fruitless of result. For our own parts, we cannot imagine a grander spectacle of the play of mighty and uncontrollable forces working to an end far beyond the reach of either combatant, than this civil war on the American continent, where freedom has found so slow, so shortsighted, so reluctant, in many respects so un- worthy, and yet so mighty a champion, while the most original and intellectual statesman or modern times has led on the Slave Power to the most brilliant and yet disastrous of onsets, terminating in a despair that is even now filling its proud heart with dreams of a picturesque and passionate suicide. We do not so much wonder that the limited sym- pathies of English politicians are unable to choose a defi- nitive side in this great conflict ; but that they should ignore the signs of a mighty revolution, only the mightier that it works alike through the instrumentality of those who hate it, of those who dread it even while they forward it, and of the very few who accept it heartily and serve it willingly, would not be explicable at all, were it not so common with us to close our eyes against what we do not wish to understand, and to insist on reading off events by the light of fastidious tastes and self-fostered prejudices.
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