constitutions and statutes; not, indeed, the perjured and unprincipled cant which has no conscience against swearing allegiance to a Constitution and laws which it declares sinful, in order to grasp emoluments and advantages, and then pleads "conscience" for disobeying what it had voluntarily sworn to obey; but the everlasting law of right in the word of God. Constitutions and laws which contravene this, ought to be lawfully amended or repealed; and it is the duty of all citizens to seek it. Let this be applied to the Fugitive Slave Law. If the bondage was intrinsically unrighteous, then the Federal law which aided in remanding the fugitive to it, legalized a wrong. It became, therefore, the duty of all United States officers, who were required by statute to execute this law—not, indeed, to hold their offices and emoluments, and swear fidelity, and then plead conscientious scruples for the neglect of these sworn functions, (for this is a detestable union of theft and perjury with hypocrisy,)—but to resign those offices wholly, with their profits and their sinful functions. It would have become the duty of any private citizen, who might have been summoned by a United States officer, to act in a posse, guard, or any other way in enforcing this law, to decline obedience; and then, in accordance with Scripture, to submit meekly to the legal penalty of such a refusal, until the unrighteous law were repealed. But, moreover, it would have become the right and duty of these and all other citizens to seek the repeal of that law, or, if necessary, the abrogation of that Federal compact which necessitated it. But on the other hand, when we proved that the relation of master and slave is not unrighteous, and that therefore the Fugitive Slave Law required the perpetration of no wrong, and was constitutional, it became the clear moral duty of every citizen to concur in obeying it.

Once more: the true key of the more commanding question of free soil was in the same abstract ethical point. If the relation of master and servant was unrighteous, and the institution a standing sin against God and human rights, then it was not to be extended at the mere dictate of convenience and gain. Although Northern men might be compelled to admit that, in the States, it was subject to State control alone, and expressly exempted from all interference of the Federal Government by the Constitution; yet, outside of the States, that Constitution and Government, representative as it was as a majority of free States, ought not to have been prostituted to the extension of a great moral wrong. Those free States ought, if their Southern partners would not consent to relinquish their right by a peaceable amendment of the Constitution, to have retired from the odious compact, and to have surrendered the advantages of the Union for conscience' sake. If, on the contrary, African slavery in America was no unrighteousness, no sin against human rights, and no contradiction to the doctrines of the Constitution, then the general teachings of that instrument concerning the absolute equality of the States and their several citizens under it, were too clear to leave a doubt, that the letter and spirit of the document gave the slaveholder just the same right to carry his slaves into any territory, with that of the Connecticut man to carry his clock-factory. Hence the ethical question, when once the slavery agitation became inevitable, should have been made the great question by us. The halls of Congress should have rung with the arguments, the newspaper press should have teemed with them. But little was done to purpose in this discussion, save by clergymen and literary men; and for reasons already indicated they were practically unheard. After it was too late to stem the torrent of passion and sectional ambition pouring against us, politicians did indeed awake to a tardy perception of these important views; but the eyes of the Northern people were then obstinately closed against them by a foregone conclusion.

We have cited these recent and striking illustrations of the fundamental importance of the ethical discussion, to justify the task we have undertaken. Some may suppose that, as the United States are no more as they were, and slaveholding is absolutely and finally ended, the question is obsolete. This is a great mistake. The status of the negro is just beginning to develop itself as an agitating and potent element in the politics of America. It will still continue the great ground of contrast, and subject of moral strife, between the North and the South.

We have attempted to indicate the potency of the slow and silent but irresistible influence of opinion over human affairs. Let our enemies claim the triumph without question in the field of opinion; let them continue to persuade mankind successfully that we were a people stained by a standing social crime; and we shall be continually worsted by them. In order to be free, we must be respected: and to this end we must defend our good name. We need not urge that instinctive desire for the good opinion of our fellow-men, and that sense of justice, which must ever render it painful to be the objects of undeserved odium. Instead, therefore, of regarding the discussion of the rightfulness of African slavery as henceforth antiquated, we believe that it assumes, at this era, a new and wider importance. While the swords of our people were fighting the battles of a necessary self-defence, the pens of our statesmen should have been no less diligent in defending us against the adverse opinion of a prejudiced world. Every opening should have been seized to disabuse the minds of Europeans, a jury to which we have hitherto had no access, although condemned by it. The discussion should everywhere have been urged, until public opinion was effectually rectified and made just to the Confederate States.

At the first glance, it appears an arduous, if not a hopeless undertaking, to address the minds of such nations as the North and Great Britain in defence of Southern slavery. We have to contend against the prescriptive opinions and prejudices of years' growth. We assert a thesis which our adversaries have taken pains to represent as an impossible absurdity, of which the very assertion is an insult to the understanding and heart of a freeman. Ten thousand slanders have given to the very name of Southern slaveholder a colouring, which darkens every argument that can be advanced in his favour. Yet the task of self-defence is not entirely discouraging. Our best hope is in the fact that the cause of our defence is the cause of God's Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience. For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text. It will in the end become apparent to the world, not only that the conviction of the wickedness of slaveholding was drawn wholly from sources foreign to the Bible, but that it is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic, and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of Terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the United States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism. Because we believe that God intends to vindicate His Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it; because we confidently rely in the force of truth to explode all dangerous error; therefore we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders. The anti-scriptural, infidel, and radical grounds upon which our assailants have placed themselves, make our cause practically the cause of truth and order. This is already understood here by thinking men who have seen