NEWS OF THE WEEK.
TWNspeech of the week is Mr. Forster's lecture on the American crisis, delivered to his constituents at Bradford. It is really pleasant, among the columns of verbiage on American affairs which we are compelled to read, to stumble over such a specimen of close, manly reasoning. Throwing aside the tiresome talk about the ille- gality of secession, Mr. Forster strips the contest once more of the flimsy wrappings with which the secret friends of the South seek to conceal its deformity. The war, he says, is an anti-slavery war. The North may riot have armed to abolish a:Artery, but the South did arm to extend it, and the object as well as the certain result of the struggle, is to frustrate that attempt. It is human freedom which is at stake, and the moral cowardice of many Americans, and the silly vapouring of many more, ought no more to affect freemen than vestry twaddle affects the friends of municipal self-government. Mr. Forster expressed himself confident that if the war lasted the North must win in the end, and hinted that the result might leave the South a separate but subordinate Republic with greatly restricted territory, without Florida, Texas, or the Mississippi, and pressed by a dan- gerous East Indian competition. The war also will have taught the mean whites their value, and slavery growing unpopular, becoming less valuable, and forbidden to extend, may ultimately die out. In any case, any result acceptable to the North must be more favourable to its extinction than Southern victory.
