THE SOUTH HAVE DONE WITH ARGUMENT.
“Yea, doubtless,” saith the Abolitionist, “for reason fails them.” And
so we have all done with argument; for we shall not stop to reply to
this. “The South know their rights,” said a Southern gentleman the
other day on the floor of Congress, very significantly, and in
relation to this subject. This, we believe, is the present common
feeling of the slaveholding States. They have made up their minds; and
we think they will have the sympathy of the reasonable part of
mankind. Their present attitude is that of pointing the people of this
country to the bulwark of the Federal Constitution; and if that will
not protect them, “they know their rights.” We do not quote this
language to expose the Southerners to the charge of holding up a
menace; for we do not accept it as such, and think it would be unfair
for any body to do so. They stand on the defensive; they have been
assailed, and are yet assailed; they have felt themselves insulted on
the floor of Congress by indirect attempts to invade their rights of
State sovereignty; they have been compelled to special legislation and
other public action to defend their own territories from violation;
they have dreamed of seeing their wives and children butchered, and
their houses pillaged and burned; they have seen, in imagination, and
as a natural consequence of the Abolition movement unresisted and
unchecked, all these and many other horrors of a like kind, enacted
before their eyes; they have seen the Government upturned, society
dissolved, and anarchy stalking amid the triumphs of its own
desolation over their fields; and with such prospects before them, as
the result of a foreign interference, organized in open violation of
the laws of the land, and in the face of a solemn national compact
forbidding such aggression, and engaging to protect and defend them
against it, are they not entitled to say--“We know our rights?” How
long must they suffer--how long must they be menaced by such invasion,
before they may say, we will suffer it no longer? A day of anxiety is
as a year of torment; a year of such suspense, is as an age of agony.
And what will they do? Why, clearly, break loose from the Union, to
which, generally, they have already made up their minds, in case of
necessity, they being judges--if the straws in the wind are any sure
indication of its career--“Necessity needs no law.” If the Government
of the country will not protect them, they must protect themselves, or
try to do so. They may fail, and prove impotent; but when men are
insulted and outraged, especially the men of the South, they are not
nice calculators of consequences; and it is for us of the North to
determine, whether we are willing to see our brethren of the South
driven to such a resort, by the continued action of an unlawful
combination, that exists and has grown up among ourselves; whether,
indeed, we are willing to see the Government of this proud Republic
rent asunder by such a cause, and to hazard the consequences.
If any body thinks these remarks are not well founded, we are sorry
they are not better observers of the symptomatic phenomena of our own
society. If they should think them unreasonable and out of place, we
are sorry for that also, as we have judged otherwise, and take leave
to invite their attention to the next chapter.