TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SOUTHERN APOSTOLATE IN ENGLAND.
. BERESFORD HOPE is, perhaps, the most intelligent and docile of all the disciples whom the Slave States and their able politicians have found in England. The re- sult of that "intense study" which, as he told his Liverpool audience yesterday week, ho had during the last three years given to this subject, has been, no doubt, to mould his flexible intellect and sympathetic heart into the very attitude of the slave-driver's ; and the result shows itself in flashes of arbi- trary eloquence and gleams of splendid mockery against English prejudices which, we are not surprised to find, filled the " Southern Club " of Liverpool with enthusiasm and delight. That passage about Lord Russell's hardness of be- lief as to the universal prevalence of English sympathy with the South, was conceived in the strong spirit and expressed with all the elegant diction, of a mind tutored in the bar- room conversations of Baltimore or Mobile. " He had once heard the story of a gentleman who was accused of intoxica- tion, and being a man of a kind of statesmanlike mind,— such a man as should preside at the British Foreign Office (roars of laughter),—he said, for his part, he was unwilling to consider any gentleman intoxicated until he saw that gentleman trying to light his pipe at the pump. (Great laughter.) Now, it seemed to him that Lord Russell re- quired equal stringency of proof before he would under- stand that the sympathies of this nation were with the Con- federate States. (Laughter.)" That is very nicely illustrated, and in a form that would, perhaps, appeal yet more popularly to the every-day experience of the Southern citizen than even to the cheery imagination of the Liverpool sympathizers. And when, amidst universal acclamations, Mr. Hope branded our Attorney-General, Sir Bounden Palmer, as, in type at least, a genuine "Bostonian statesman, in the pure and true sense of the word, which the political ahuffiers of the intellec- tual city of Boston put forward," the Confederates present must have felt, with sudden joy, that the spirit of the late Hon. W. L. Yancey, or the late Mr. Brooks, of South Carolina, or some other heart of fire, miscalled a fire-eater, had taken possession of the wealthy and generous British politician. But the best evidence of Mr. Hope's proficiency in the Southern school of thought was, of course, his happy mode of comparing the condition of the " black peasantry ' of the South with that of the English agricultural labourer, with which he, of course, as a man of large property, is thoroughly familiar. " They would find that, apart from the question whether the system of black labour was or was not justi- fiable, it was admitted that the black peasant of the Southern States was as well clothed, as well fed, as well sent to church, as any peasant in the world. (Loud cheers.)" There is a largeness of view here in the picture of what a peasantry should be—" well fed, well clothed, and well sent to church " there to hear, one would hope, carefully selected lessons,—which must have filled the minds of his English audience with vain regrets. The English peasantry, if they could but be effectually bought up by their landlords, might be also well fed, well clothed, and well sent to church. As a Richmond paper not long ago pointed out, if your capitalist could but own all his labourers, the problem of competition for wages and for various other and more valuable things might be solved, or rather annihilated. You can feed, dress, and drive your peasantry to church, or to the cotton- ground, as the case may be, if once you own them. And, then, as to owning them, continues Mr. Beresford Hope, with subtle and daring logic, it is, after all, a distinction of words more than of things. "He might tell them that he was talking the other day to a Southerner, and said to him, We don't like the word " slave," why don't you get rid of it ?' His friend replied, Well, we don't use it in the Southern States; we call them " servants," or "people."' Then he said, Why don't you get rid of it?'" The friend did not reply, and Mr. Beresford Hope did not, as he might have done, reply for him "because we went to war expressly to prevent either getting rid of it, or softening its mean- ing,—in order that it might have a more permanent and austere meaning," — for that would have been a painful mode of putting it. Mr.- Beresford Hope knew, like his Southern friend, how to put it more delicately. " It was like a question," he said, " which had been agitated in some of the counties of England as between the lessees and tenants-at-will." There might, perhaps, be more like- ness than there is between the two questions ; but that only shows better the great delicacy of Mr. Hope's discrimi- nation in pointing out what there is. " The theoretical differ- ences [between the English system and the Slave-State system of labour] were greater than the practical, and if he might prophesy, in 100, 50, or 30 years hence, the question of black labour in the Confederate States would become then just what the great questions of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the Free-trade Bill, and the Catholic Emancipation were in England." There is a difficulty here which Mr. Beresford Hope, with more time, would, no doubt, explain satisfactorily. Supposing the Orangemen had established a separate state or kingdom apart from the Liberals, but including all the Catholics, simply in order to extend and strengthen the penal enactments against the Catholics, is it clear how soon the Catholic emancipation would have been passed ? But, of course, every difficulty could not have been met in a single speech, and Mr. Beresford Hope had done enough already in reducing the question of slavery to a question of " theory," rather than practice, and setting- forth some of the advantages 'of the black peasantry, in being well fed, well clothed, and well driven to Church, over the English. Mr. Hope having once taught us to see in the slave-driver's lash the true symbol of freedom, we may trust him to develop to us at some future time the proof that, as the legitimate sway of that lash extends, the use of it will be relinquished. It is something that a man bred in England has acquired so aptly the free logic and homely morality of the Slave States.
But Mr. Beresford Hope is only a humble learner, after all, —a very acute learner, much more intelligent than Mr. Lindsay, though scarcely more deeply imbued than the latter with the spirit of the noble cause he advocates,—but necessarily unable to realize with full intensity the whole scheme of life in the Southern Confederacy. But England is not left with- out direct teaching from the pure source of the slave principle itself. The Surrey farmers were instructed by a direct missionary from the Slave States on the same day on which the eloquent Englishman tried his " 'prentice hand" on explaining slavery to the Southern Club, at Liver- pool. At Chertsey, Mr. Lindsay introduced to the warm- hearted agriculturists of Surrey a Southern colonel who had fought at Bull Run, and who was received,—if we may trust the Standard,—with rapturous enthusiasm by the tillers of the English soil. " All through the after-dinner speeches," says the Standard, " the labourers outside, waiting for the distribution of prizes, were hammering for admission. Those at the table inside were fascinated by an interest which they felt to be of a novel kind." No doubt it was exceedingly novel, for Colonel Lamar stood amongst them dispelling the illusion that slavery has been, or is, anything but a blessed decree of Providence for the salvation of Africa, and their English hearts opened at once with manly candour, as the Standard testifies, to receive this teaching :—" The Surrey farmers felt for this brave man, they hung upon his lips, and cheered him till the welkin rang, as, in thoughts that speak and words that burn,' he told them how the South loved Eng- land, bow she rejoiced in her possession of all the political privileges which Englishmen hold dear, how, threatened by a mongrel and degenerate rase, which claimed the same affinity, but had proved itself unworthy of it, she had fought a good fight to defend what is dearer to her than life." The substance of Colonel Lamar's teaching, however, was more valuable than even the Standard would lead us to believe. He dwelt first on the noble nature of agricultural pursuits. Nearly all the people of the Southern States, he tells us, "see in each upturned sod of their fallow ground that which is more precious to them than the gold of California—the sparkle of independence and of personal liberty." The fallow ground, we conclude, represents especially this " independence and personal liberty," because it is still idle and fruitless, while the cultivated ground would represent a certain amount of effec- tive industry, and, therefore, of that " dependence and personal servitude " which is happily associated with in- dustry in this blessed land. Colonel Lamar said that he ascribed the warlike character of the South to its association with the soil ; "he believed, without disparaging other pursuits, that from the culture of the soil, the drawing of sustenance from the bosom of mother earth, they derived a certain moral nutriment, a certain richness of sentiment, of capacity for self-devotion and sacrifice, which kept the heart fresh and pure, and made the nature of men simple and un- affected. (Cheers.)" By a beautiful provision of Providence it appears that the "nutriment and richness,"—the fat of the land, we suppose,—is conducted through the channel of the actual labourer, the slave, who stops none of it in the way, but hands it on to the slave-owner. He ripens and fills out with the sap which this human conduit-pipe obediently transmits to him, without absorbing any of it. How subtle a testimony to the supernatural character of the institution is here given us ! Colonel Lamar avowed frankly " the diversity " of opinion which existed between his "hearers and himself as to some of the institutions" involved in slavery ; but he maintained, and called upon the meeting to admit, that "the South had been the guardians, the protectors, the benefactors of the black man," —" they had elevated him in the scale of rational existence, they had Christianized him to a state to which he had never before attained." " The negro race," he said, " with all its foulness and barbarity, being naturally a servile race, had become domesticated, and in spite of the institution of slavery if they pleased, but still with slavery, had risen higher and higher in the rational scale, until now it furnished heroes and heroines for modern romance." " If the time should -ever come for the South to believe that liberty would be a boon and not a curse, then the South would be prepared to confer that boon upon them." In the mean- time, as Colonel Lamar modestly forgot to point out, the benefactors of the black race are fighting solely and disin- terestedly for the right to " guard, protect, benefit, elevate, and Christianize the black man," over a wider area than the North in its churlish malignity chooses to concede as the theatre of that great philanthropic task. A. nobler cause can scarcely be imagined ; only Colonel Lamar was too bashful to -expound it in its full dignity. The Northern States had wished Colonel Lamar and his friends to restrict their benevolent work of " guarding, protecting, benefiting, elevating, and Christianizing" the black man to their own Southern States. The South claimed the divine right of carrying on that noble missionary work in any part of the Union,—in the great half-settled Territories, especially—nay, even in the so-called free States also. What could be worse than the impiety of drawing a strict boundary round the area of this divinest task of man ? Who could renounce his right "to guard, protect, benefit, elevate, and Christianize " the black man, wherever and whenever they could find him? No doubt, when they have wrung from the North this blessed privilege, they will wring it from England too, if the noble missionaries who are now pleading the cause with Liverpool merchants and Surrey farmers do not first persuade us to give it them as a free gift. That is really what Mr. Beresford Hope, and Mr. Lindsay, and Colonel Lamar should call upon us to do at once ; and surely many an English heart, like that of the enthusiastic Surrey farmers and the Liverpool magnates, would bound in willing acquiescence. Would not this be the best specific aim for these noble-minded men's labours? Charity 'begins at home. It is all very well to give our moral sympathy to the South as against the North. But is that -enough for our own consciences? Should we not say at once to Colonel Lamar and Mr. Hope, " Let us set the true example to the North. We blame the North most justly for refusing to the South the inalienable privilege to "guard, pro- tect, benefit, elevate, and Christianize" the black man where- ever they may take him or find him. But let us practise before we preach. Let us accord to the South the full right to guard, protect, benefit, elevate, and Christianize' the black man on English soil, according to the spirit of its own noble institutions,—on British soil and the soil of British colonies,—and then we can honestly and with a clear con- science upbraid the North for wishing, in this niggardly and malignant spirit, to limit the range of this beneficence, and say to that exalted type of Christianity, 6 Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.'" This, we think, would be our true response to the noble appeals of Mr. Beresford Hope, Mr. Lindsay, and Colonel Lamar.
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