The latest line of the programme.
[from the New York Daily News.]
The earnestness with which the war journals have gone to work during the last few days to stimulate the anti-slavery feeling, gives conclusive evidence that their object in this war is abolition.
They have concluded that the hour for unmasking has arrived, and we may soon expect to see a negro rampant and shattered fetter lock, noir on a field of gules, blazoned to the world as their device.
It is fortunate for the people that the impatient fanaticism of these experimentalists has thus early got the better of their prudence, or rather of their cunning, for prudence as Bull Run, its antecedents and its consequents have demonstrated, is not of their vocabulary.
The people will now be able to draw a line distinctly between the Peace party and War party.--Hereafter those who still lay ‘"that flattering unction to their souls,"’ that they are fighting for the Union and its flag, will be behind the age; they will resemble Doblin on the treadmill, who fancies he is getting along finely on his journey, while he is simply grinding his master's corn. The Abolition journals will not now cease to urge their panacea upon the North, until it has been swallowed or emphatically declined. Like the Roman Senator who, devoted to a single object, said only, ‘"Delenda est Carthago"’ in debate, whatever might be the subject under consideration, we shall have nothing now but the reiteration of ‘"Slavery is doomed"’ thrust by these mock philanthropists upon the public car. They have hinged their moral upon their political code so cleverly that the point of separation is undiscernible to their own vision. It is an undoubted fact that many who heretofore have entertained no thought of Abolitionism have been gradually coaxed, by the sophistries of these arch mischief makers, to seriously regard the application of that detestable doctrine as a necessity in the present strife.
Such proselytes are of that class whose sectional jealousy has been inflamed past endurance by the late defeat. Without strength of character sufficient to bear with manly fortitude the humiliation of a reverse, they are glad to catch at any suggestion, however sinful or impracticable, that seems to yield a chance of turning the tables upon their victors. But with the masses of the North the experiment will fail. They will be neither driven nor entrapped into antagonism with justice and their own interests. When once fully convinced of what to the keen observer is a palpable fact, that from the bead of the nation down to the pettiest. Abolition scribbler, the partisans of Black Republicanism are in league against the Southern constitutional privilege, and are prosecuting the war with that ultimate design, the elements that have provided money and men for this Administration will evaporate like dew drops beneath a scorching sun. Let the people know, as they soon will know, that the spirit of Abolitionism stalks in the van of their armies, and the war is at an end. Money chests will be closed and swords will be sheathed with a sudden decisiveness that will leave Mr. Lincoln, like a political Selkirk, sublime in the extremity of his solitude.
The North cannot be so utterly deficient in perceptive faculty as not to understand at first thought, if not instinctively, that to continue this war in the spirit of a crusade against slavery is to confirm the separation of the sections. It seems like listening to the ravings of an opium cater, to hear these dreamers talk of rebuilding the fabric of the Union with the very instruments that have accomplished its destruction. To conceive that millions of freemen will live in concord with us after we shall have robbed them of their property to the amount of hundreds of millions, is a stretch of the imagination that must have reduced that quality in the conceivers to a condition of dangerous tension. Even Mr. Greeley's expansive idealism might be expected to collapse after such a desperate strain. It reminds one of Pope's couplet:
‘ "If to go in. Sir, you go out--
The way you take is strangely round about."
If chastisement and subjugation be the only objects of the war, then, indeed, it may be well enough to aim at this tendon Achilles — this ‘"most vulnerable spot."’ as the Abolitionists say of the South. But chastisement, one or two events have proved, is likely to be a some what costly and dangerous luxury; and as to subjugation, it admits of disputation whether the victors of Big Bethel and Bull Run will ever bond very meekly beneath the chariot wheels that are to be sunk into their soil. This Abolition Administration and its creatures know that, in attempting to conquer the South, they have assumed an Augean task, for the accomplishment of which they have no Hercules at their command. They should know that, although in point of valor we are on an equality with the South, yet where it amounts to an invasion of the soil of free-born Americans, discomfiture will be our portion in the end — As surely as the North strikes one blow at slavery, so surely will that blow recoil upon itself. Shame upon the howling fanatics who insist upon thrusting their poison into the life-blood of the country at such a time as this ! When the last hope of reconciliation shall have vanished, when the dismemberment of the Union shall be an accomplished fact, as it will be should Abolition be made a feature of this war, let those who set the hounds upon the scent of slavery remember that the detestable deed was theirs.
’
