With the North, it is a question of existence.
--The atrocious conduct of the Lincoln Government in silencing the press in suppressing liberty of speech, and in bringing the Bastille into wholesale requisition; and the abject submission of the Northern people to this despotic policy, may, their approval and laudation of it, are subjects of constant surprise to the Southern public, and the conjectural explanations given for them are more various and contradictory. Considering that the North is the aggressor in this contest, that its measures against the South are of its own origination, and may be terminated at its own option; considering that nobody's interests at the North are threatened from the South, that there is no conspiracy whatever against the Northern Government, and no assault threatened upon Northern society, these arbitrary measures against the liberty of the press, of opinion and discussion, and of the person seem wholly uncalled for and gratuitous.--There might be some excuse for the inauguration of a dictatorship at the South, where servile insurrection is plotted, where the land is invaded, where the authorities are impeached as rebels, and where not only Government is assailed but society itself attempted to be undermined. Yet it is at the North that a cowardly and atrocious petty tyranny and terrorism are practiced, while these things are wholly unknown and unthought of at the South. The contrast thus presented is the most remarkable in all its circumstances that can be found in the history of human affairs.We need not spend any words in accounting for the absence of a dictatorship at the South. Our people would not submit to it, except under an overwhelming sense of public danger; and they are strangers, notwithstanding the threats and formidable demonstrations of the North, to any sense of such danger from that quarter.
But the practice of these tyrannical measures at the North, and the fame submission of that people to them are subjects of universal surprise, and puzzled conjecture. It is reasonable to suppose that the Northern people have not become indifferent to civil liberty, and would not allow it to be overthrown, except from some great controlling public conviction of the necessity of submission to the alternative. What is that sentiment, and what the facts in which it originates?
We find the best men of the North--those, at least, whom we have been in the habit of regarding as their best men — concurring in a common purpose with the worst, of upholding Lincoln's Government in all its measures, right, or wrong. Buchanan, Dallas, Cass Dickinson, Cushing, Richardson, Douglas, and Cadwalladervie with the Blairs, Seward, Greeley, Sherman, Weed, Grow, Sumner, and Hale, in giving their active support to the war, and in earnest exhortations for its vigorous prosecution on the most formidable scale. Indeed, the rank and file of their armies, so far as composed of native citizens, are composed three to one of the men who belonged before the war to the Democratic party, the party which took sides with the South in resisting, at the inception, the very measures which are now having their legitimate consummation.
What, then, can be the meaning and the explanation of this remarkable state of things at the North 1. There can be but one explanation; and that is a common sense that public ruin must be the result of the success of secession. The Northern people are thoroughly imbued with the conviction, that the loss of the South to the Union will destroy their prosperity, reduce them to poverty, overturn Government, and dissolve society itself. Their conviction is well founded. Losing the South, what is there to hold the Northwest in longer union with the Eastern and Middle States? The geographical shape of their territory is itself sufficient to insure its separation; to say nothing of the stronger interests which would attract the Northwest to the South, and the certain loss of the Pacific slope to the Puritan Confederacy of New England and New York, with which it can have no congeniality. There is, moreover, as little sympathy between New England and the Middle States as between New York and Philadelphia, or as between Hartford and San Francisco. The separation of the South will be the signal for the thorough disintegration of what will remain of the Union; for the part remaining will be the least homogeneous aggregation of communities on the face of the globe.
The North still cling to the delusion that the South will ultimately come back and assent to reconstruction. In that delusion they are bent upon crushing out the sentiment at the South hostile to such an arrangement. They will not believe or realize the fact that public opinion here on that subject is long ago concluded and irrevocable. They are fighting us with that delusion, and with the settled conviction that secession must overthrow their political system at home, and prostrate forever the wealth and prosperity of the North. We have exposed the certainty of their financial and industrial ruin, from secession, on too many occasions for it to be necessary to point out again the grounds of their own fixed conviction of that fact. It is upon this conviction that they are acting. They themselves are telling us that this conviction is the motive upon which they are prosecuting the war with so much determination. The language of Mr. Dallas at Philadelphia expresses the sentiment of the whole North on this subject. Defeat secession, or the North is undone. Rule or ruin is the alternative presented by the contest.
