The Perils of peace.
--If the fruits of the Southern Revolution are not to turn to ashes in our hands, the framers of our laws must impose not only restrictions, but a total prohibition, upon the exercise of the right of suffrage by persons coming here after the war from the North. It should require, as is the case in England, a special legislative enactment to naturalize any individual emigrant. If Virginia is to become, as is probable, a great manufacturing State, we shall have Lynn and Lowell transferred at the end of the war to our Old Dominion watercourses; and if Lynn and Lowell are to be permitted to vote in Virginia, we should like to know whether Lynn and Lowell are expected to vote for any policy that favors the perpetuation of African slavery. We have no hesitation in saying that Virginia, under such a state of things, would be worse off than she ever was before the war, or could have been under Lincoln's administration. --What is the South in arms for, if, after a long and bloody struggle, and such generous and heroic sacrifices as no people ever made before, the men who are invading us, who are butchering our sons and brothers, and threatening to consign the women of the South to the most horrible of fates, are to be permitted to come among us in the guise of friends, and despairing of subjugating us in the field, subjugate us at the ballot box.Of all populations in the world, the manufacturing population of New England is the very last we desire to see in Virginia. It is the most ignorant, sensual, intermeddling, and immoral of all the Puritan herd. There is no question of politics, theology, ethics, or science the New England manufacturers do not feel themselves competent to solve. They conceive themselves capable not only of manufacturing hollow brass trunk rivets and shoes with brown paper soles, but they make a bran new constitution in a day and turn out a new religion in a night. To New England belongs the honor of inventing every ism that has ever distracted America. The deluded votaries of Spiritualism, Mormonism, Free Love, are made up principally of its manufacturing population. The idea that the rural population of Virginia — the most manly, generous, refined population in the world — are to be invaded at every waterfall and every mountain stream by hordes of New England artisans, is bad enough; but if, in addition to this, they are to wield political power in this State, and thus be enabled to extinguish and expel slavery from Virginia, we might as well never have taken up arms; for if Lincoln had done his worst he could only have inaugurated a system for gradual abolition in the border States--a work which we will perform ourselves if we do not confine the right of suffrage to our own people.
