Northern and Southern nations.
Various Black Republican journals are inspiring the courage of their readers with the assertion that ‘"Southern nations have never been conquerors, but, on the other hand, are easily subdued."’ All the young Wide-Awakes are said to be repeating this stupendous historical discovery at the various bar-rooms, and to imagine themselves for the time Alexanders, CÆsars, and Napoleons, gloriously oblivious of the fact that each of those conquerors of the world was of a Southern clime. The Day Book reminds the valiant ignoramuses that Southern nations have done far more than their share of the conquering business since history begun. The Greeks, Romans, the Arabs under Mahomet, and the Spaniards under Philip, were Southern slaveholders. The Southern Moors penetrated the North to Vienna, and but for the valor of Sobieski, would have mastered all Europe. If Rome fell before Alaric, it was because its own legions sided with the invader. In reply to the foolish boast that the South can be subjugated in six months, the Day Book says:‘ Twenty times six months will hardly witness the beginning of it. Mr. Lincoln's term of office will only serve for the inauguration of the stupendous impossibility, and it will be left for some other President — if one can be elected who will do it — to carry on the suicidal work of subjugating a free people. Napoleon declared that ‘"no nation attached to its institutions and its form of government can ever be conquered."’ His own invasion of Russia, and his Peninsular wars in Spain, had severely impressed this lesson upon his mind. The Spanish Armada of Philip II, gives a strong hint in the same way. The Peloponnesian civil war of thirty years, or of Hannibal's sixteen years invasion of Italy, might, one would think, teach our madmen something, if they would sit still long enough to think about it. Then, there is the Spanish invasion of the Netherlands, which gives a lesson, too. All history is full enough of lessons, if men would only get their senses long enough to think about them. Ask England what her experience was in ‘"conquering"’ the few poor and scattered colonists on this continent, and she will tell you that those few men who stood up in the House of Lords and said: --‘"My Lords, you cannot conquer America,"’ were the only sane men in England, while all the rest, the king included, were mad.
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