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There will be no

There will be

drugged and silenced on earth, will speak out. doubt nor question as to the right and wrong. no vain excuses, nor any attempt to make them. There will be no more sophistry, no more considerations of expediency, no more pleading of the laws of men and the customs of society, no more talk about organic sins being converted into constructive righteousness, or collective and corporate frauds releasing men from individual responsibilities.

When we see a man, a professed Christian, running a race with the worshippers of wealth and fashion, absorbed in the vanities of the world, or endeavoring to serve both God and mammon, we hear the voice, Step to the capain's office and settle! When we see editors and politicians setting power in the place of goodness, and expediency in the place of justice, and law in the place of equity, and custom in the place of right, putting darkness for light, and evil for good, and tyranny for general benevolence, we think of the day when the issuers of such counterfeit money will be brought to light, and their sophistries and lies exposed, for among the whole tribe of unprincipled politicians there will be great consternation when the call comes to step to the captain's office and settle. When we see unjust rulers in their pride of power fastening chains upon the bondmen, oppressing the poor, and playing their pranks of defiant tyranny before high heaven, then also come these words to mind, like a blast from the last trumpet, Step to the captain's office and settle!

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G. B. Cheever.

THERE

CCLXI.

THE MURDER OF THE SOUL.

HERE are some people whose sympathies have been excited upon the subject of slavery, who, if they can only be satis fied that the slaves have enough to eat, think it is all very well and that nothing more is to be said or done.

If slaves were merely animals, whose only or chief enjoyment cor.sisted in the gratification of their bodily appetites, there would be some show of sense in this conclusion. But, in fact, however crushed and brutified, they are still men; men whose bosoms beat with the same passions as our own; whose hearts swell with

the same aspirations, the same ardent desire to improve their condition; the same wishes for what they have not; the same indifference towards what they have; the same restless love of social superiority; the same greediness of acquisition; the same desire to know; the same impatience of all external control.

The excitement which the singular case of Caspar Hauser produced a few years since in Germany, is not yet forgotten. From the representations of that enigmatical personage, it was believed that those from whose custody he declared himself to have escaped, had endeavored to destroy his intellect, or rather to prevent it from being developed, so as to detain him forever in a state of infantile imbecility. This supposed attempt at what they saw fit to denominate the murder of the soul, gave rise to great discussions among the German jurists; and they soon raised it into a new crime, which they placed at the very head of social enormities.

It is this very crime, the murder of the soul, which is in the course of continuous and perpetual perpetration throughout the Southern States of the American Union; and not upon a single individual only, but upon nearly one half of the entire population.

Consider the slaves as men, and the course of treatment which custom and the laws prescribe is an artful, deliberate, and welldigested scheme to break their spirit; to deprive them of cou age and of manhood; to destroy their natural desire for an equa participation in the benefits of society; to keep them ignorant, and therefore weak; to reduce them, if possible, to a state of idiocy; to crowd them down to a level with the brutes.

R. Hildreth.

CCLXII.

JUDICIAL TRIBUNALS.

LET me here say that I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect; but I am too familiar with the history of judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a full share of frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanc

tion. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment.

It was a judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem, bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave; which arrested the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles, and sent him in bonds from Judea to Rome; which, in the name of the Old Religion, adjudged the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death, in all its most dreadful forms; and which afterwards, in the name of the New Religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition, amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun.

It was a judicial tribunal which, in France, during the long reign of her monarchs, lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief reign of terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen, to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield, over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers; which, after elaborate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of ship-money against the patriotic resistance of Hampden; which, in defiance of justice and humanity, sent Sydney and Russell to the block; which persistently enforced the laws of Conformity that our Puritan Fathers persistently refused to obey; and which afterwards, with Jeffries on the bench, crimsoned the pages of English history with massacre and murder-even with the blood of innocent woman.

Ay, sir, and it was a judicial tribunal in our country, surrounded by all the forms of law, which hung witches at Salem, - which affirmed the constitutionality of the Stamp Act, while it admonished "jurors and the people" to obey,—and which now, in our day, has lent its sanction to the unutterable atrocity of the Fugitive Slave Bill.

C. Sumner.

CCLXIII.

SLAVERY THE MAIN-SPRING OF THE REBELLION.

THE

HE whole quantity of slave-owners, great and small, according to the recent census, is not more than four hundred thousand; out of whom there are not more than one hundred thousand who are interested to any considerable extent in this peculiar species of property; and yet this petty oligarchy — itself controlled by a squad still more petty in a population of many millions, has aroused and organized this gigantic rebellion. The future historian will record that the present rebellion-notwithstanding its protracted origin, the multitudes it has enlisted, and its extensive sweep- was at last precipitated by fewer than twenty men; Mr. Everett says, by as few as ten. It is certain that thus far it has been the triumph of a minority; but of a minority moved, inspired, combined, and aggrandized by slavery.

And now this traitorous minority, putting aside all the lurking, slimy devices of conspiracy, steps forth in the full panoply of war. Assuming to itself all the functions of a government, it organizes States under a common head - sends ambassadors into foreign countries- levies taxes borrows money issues let

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ters of marque - and sets armies in the field, summoned from distant Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as from nearer Virginia, and composed of the whole lawless population — the poor who cannot own slaves as well as the rich who own them throughout the extensive region where, with satanic grasp, this slaveholding minority claims for itself

- ample room and verge enough

The characters of hell to trace."

Pardon the language which I employ. The words of the poet do not picture too strongly the object proposed. And now these parricidal hosts stand arrayed openly against that paternal Government to which they owed loyalty, protection, and affection. Never in history did rebellion assume such a front. Call their numbers four hundred thousand or two hundred thousand what you will they far surpass any armed forces ever before marshalled in rebellion; they are among the largest ever marshalled in war.

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And all this is in the name of slavery, and for the sake of slavery, and at the bidding of slavery. The profligate favorite of the English monarch the famous Duke of Buckingham — was

not more exclusively supreme

even according to those words by which he was exposed to the judgment of his contemporaries : "Who rules the kingdom? The king.

"Who rules the king? The Duke.

"Who rules the Duke? The Devil.”

The prevailing part here attributed to the royal favorite belongs now to slavery, which in the rebel States is a more than royal favorite.

Who rules the rebel States? The President.

Who rules the President? Slavery.

Who rules slavery?

The latter question I need not answer. But all must see -and nobody can deny that slavery is the ruling idea of this rebellion. It is slavery which marshals these hosts and breathes into their embattled ranks its own barbarous fire. It is slavery which stamps its character alike upon officers and men. It is slavery which inspires all, from the general to the trumpeter. It is slavery which speaks in the words of command, and which sounds in the morning drum-beat. It is slavery which digs trenches and builds hostile forts. It is slavery which pitches its white tents and stations its sentries over against the national capital. It is slavery which sharpens the bayonet and casts the bullet; which points the cannon and scatters the shell, blazing, bursting with death. Wherever this rebellion shows itself— whatever form it takes - whatever thing it does whatever it meditates it is moved by slavery; nay, it is slavery itself, incarnate, living, acting, raging, robbing, murdering, according to the essential law of its being. C. Sumner.

CCLXIV.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

MR.

R. PRESIDENT, with unspeakable delight I hail this measure and the prospect of its speedy adoption. It is the first instalment of that great debt which we all owe to an

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