Virginia or Carolina should fear and hate above all things the light of knowledge that streams from New England; it is natural that the unquestioned immorality and laxity of principle engendered by slavery should shrink from the contrast with a state of morals unsurpassed for purity in the world; and that an obsequious church and clergy, which, in the holy name of religion, and 'using the livery of heaven to serve the devil in,' had dared by the thinnest sophistries and most palpable perversions to garble the true teachings of the Bible, and been willing to brave the anathemas denounced against those who add to or subtract from aught written therein, should accede willingly to a separation which could relieve them somewhat from an odious comparison, to say the least. Compare the vigorous, consistent, and sublime theology of New England, the widely spread influence of her cultivated and philanthropic clergy, with that part of the clergy and church of the South which, in sustaining slavery, has lost all hold upon human sympathies, all influence, save in the regions where the highest crime against humanity has become a matter of interest, of sordid speculation. Alas! what sadder spectacle could be seen than the ministers of Christ using their talents to lead their people into wrong, mocking religion, trailing its snowy wings in the mire of the most corrupt political dogmas, doing their utmost to upheave that grand corner stone set by Christ himself in the primal temple of Christianity and humanity: 'All things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.'

That men and women, taught from infancy to look upon slavery as a moral and political as well as a material good; whose ideas, manners, habits have become interwoven with its existence in their midst, and who, no matter how falsely, as those may think who look upon it from a comparatively disinterested standpoint, conceive that it lies at the base of their social prosperity and happiness; who have been accustomed from forum, hustings, pulpit, and press, to hear an institution that appeals to so many selfish instincts and principles in the human heart, lauded and defended, and made to be the Ultima Thule of Southern hope, pride, and ambition; that they should view with displeasure and anger such an influence as the institutions of New England must always wield, is not so surprising. But that men can be found here in the free North, yea, more, in New England itself, to sympathize with them, to echo their degraded sentiments, and to wish to see the slave power supreme in the land, is what surpasses wonder, and almost belief. Yet a portion of a large, old, and venerated party have come to be their miserable allies and claqueurs. The truth is, we may say and believe that slavery is a dire wrong, a foul injustice, done to a whole race, and therefore ought to die, but that does not tell one half of the damning story: the worst is this, that it gradually kills out the virtue, the manliness, the moral vitality of the nation that allows it; that it has done so in our own nation to an alarming extent is the great, the fear-impelling cause why it should be rooted out, abolished, as an influence in the Government.

'Ah, but,' says the Northern traitor, 'that very abolition has done the whole mischief. If there had been no Abolitionists, there would have been no war. The Abolitionists are responsible for it all.' Softly, poor, weak-minded man! Does not any man's common sense tell him that wherever a wrong exists, it is in the nature of things that somebody should oppose it—that a desire should arise to get rid of it? It is the chief mercy of God to the world, next to His providing salvation for it, that this conscience is left to it, this sense of wrong, and the will and struggle to abolish the wrong. For such remonstrance the Abolitionists are indeed responsible!

There are certain words that have come to be used in an indefinite, canting sort of way, so that they have no meaning at all, or, at least, a meaning very deceptive. These words represent bugbears to unthinking people, and unscrupulous men do not fail to pervert this fact to their own or party ends. Such are some of the terms which have been applied to New England, both South and North. She is called radical, and a most absurd and mischievous idea of New England radicalism is rife, especially in the South. Said a Southern gentleman to me on one occasion (he was a physician, was one of the most intelligent slaveholders I ever met, and was an occasional contributor to De Bow's Review):

Par parenthese, that word freethinker is another of the terms conventionally abused. This gentleman had just been speaking of this very thing, New England radicalism, and in his query showed an evident idea that it involved that species of unbelief, that discarding of all creeds or standards of belief, popularly known as freethinking. It also includes, in the minds of many of the Southern people, the exercise of a kind of personal license, an abandoning of the good old established landmarks of thought and action, and a strong-minded striking out into new paths of experiment, regardless of form or law. A Northern woman going to the South is assumed to be strong-minded, especially, till she has proved herself feminine. There is nothing so absurd as this idea, when one considers that there is no people on earth as free, independent, and original, intellectually, as they are, who possess so deep and abiding a respect and veneration for those same laws and institutions. New England is the prolific hive whence swarm all the isms that infest the country, say they. They do not understand that in a state of society where education is universal, where mind is constantly meeting mind, and thought clashing with thought, the restless and heaving mass must be always throwing up something to the surface, it may be froth, it may be tangled weeds, rough stones, or plain shells, or it may be curious and valuable gems fit to glitter in a coronet, or shells of dazzling colors and manifold convolutions fit to shine in rare cabinets. The waveless and stagnant calm of the mass of the Southern mind can have no conception of the intellectual movement that is ever going on in such a community as New England.

But this radicalism especially bears on its 'horrid front' that bugbear of all conservatism, the world over—abolition. There is no word so abused as that. The thing itself is as old and inevitable as the relation of cause and effect, as the existence of sin and righteousness, as the contest between God and Satan. Just as if there could help being an abolition sentiment where there existed the aggressive, hateful principle of slavery!

Then that peculiar and valuable trait of Yankee character, which the French so aptly call savoir faire, and which they themselves term faculty, the power of accomplishing, the knowing how to do, the understanding how to suit means to ends, which makes a Yankee so useful and versatile, and consequently a valuable acquisition to society—has received its full share of Southern abuse and ridicule. 'They palm off upon us their inventions, half of which are worthless,' say they. 'They cheat us with their wares, their manufactures, their patents, and nostrums. They grow rich on our necessities, and take the world's trade from our harbors, so superior to theirs, and they are always busy, and intermeddling in everybody's affairs; and we hate them—ah, how we do hate them!' In short, a certain leading class at the South, that which moulds and leads the hollow, shrinking, scared thing they called public opinion, have come to hate and detest everything distinctively New English, and finally to make