Wendell Phillips and Virginia.
Wendell Phillips has recently proclaimed that the deluded masses of the South will be permitted to receive enlightenment from Northern minds, and to emancipate their slaves; but that some fifty thousand of them will be made to go in exile or dis. Under what he calls judicious treatment, he is of opinion that Virginia will soon become like New York.We have no doubt of that, whatever, What Virginia has been and is, we know. A nobler Commonwealth, in enlightened liberty, in devotion to principle, in the harmonious moral, and intellectual development of its people, never flourished in all the tide of time. We care not to boast of her past, although we might ever, without fear of contradiction, that there must be something beyond accident in the fame of a Commonwealth which, from her first settlement to the present hour, has produced generation after generation of the greatest and purest minds of the continent; which, for centuries, from the hour when John Smith first planted the seed of American civilization in her soil to the day when Washington gave to America its liberty, and from that to this, when her noble men and generous women are offering up their life blood in defence of principle and right, has been as heroic and magnanimous a Commonwealth as ever flourished in ancient or modern times. We know what she has been, and we know what she is — a people as hospitable, warm-hearted, and pure-minded as the sun ever shone upon, and who now, with an avalanche of mercenaries hurling death and destruction upon their fire-sides, stand as proud in soul and as defiant in spirit, as in the days of her greatest prosperity and power, and are prepared, to a man, to die rather than to submit to despotism.
And this is the land, which we are told, shall be one day like New York! We shall be elevated by emancipation and Yankee enlightenment to that condition! No doubt of it. We know what the progress of radical ideas and universal emancipation has done for New York. We know that it has buried the ancient respectability and intelligence of the State in an abyss, so dark and bottomless, that not even hope is left of a better day.--Note statesman is left among her public man Seward a demagogue the most subtle, and a villain the most profound who ever disgraced the history of any land, is the successor of the Clinton, Van Rennselaers and Stuyvesant. The population itself has become the most mercenary, degraded, and heartless in America. A worse collection of people, a greater amount of human depravity, cannot be found on any equal area of the earth's surface than exists in New York city. A hundred thousand beggars, more than a tenth of her whole population, depend on public charity for bread. Fifty thousand murderers robbers, and other criminals of every hue and grade are annually arraigned at her courts of justice. Fifty thousand prostitutes parade the streets at night, and as many more, who keep up an outside semblance of virtue, habitually tread the same broad road to death. --We speak upon the authority of their own journals, the N. Y. Times foremost among them, when we say that a fostering sore of depravity runs through their whole upper ten, that the parlor is often as corrupt and debauched as the kitchen, and the master as great a vulgarian and blackguard as the man.--Nor is this wonderful in a society where all social distinctions have been levelled, and the menials of yesterday become the lords and ladies of to-day. Nor is it only by the operation of social laws and democracy run mad that New York has become what she is. Circumstances have made her the sewer into which all Europe has poured its foulest abominations. All the refugees from European justice; all the reprobates of the Old World, "whose blood had flowed through scoundrels ever since the flood," and who were fairly spewed out from their native lands, have come to New York and made it their city of refuge, and began anew their career of crime, and become amalgamated and identified with the seething mass of native corruption. The current of foreign immigration that had in it anything of enterprise and value flowed over New York to the rural districts, and left there nothing but that vile sediment which has been stirred up by the present war, and which Wendell Phillips exults in believing will make a New York of Virginia.
We deal in no undiscriminating denunciation. After deducting one-fourth of the population, whose acknowledge worthlessness and open abominations make the city a moral and social eyesore to the whole civilized world, there are about as many more engaged in the pursuits of banking commerce, trade, and other branches of creative industry, who are the most energetic, wide- awake, money making, hard-hearted, swindling, and unprincipled men of business to be found in the world, who are destitute of all generous emotions, who laugh at the idea of honor, geniality, or sensibility; who have no thought, no sentiment, no passion, no hope, no Heaven, no God, but the almighty dollar. Such is the general characteristic of their respectable classes, with some exception, for there are exceptions to the general character of New York, just so there were exceptions in Sodom. There are men and women there as noble, elevated, and pure as ever lived in any land, but they are thrust out of eight, crushed to the earth, and overwhelmed by the universal torrent of mammon worship, heartlessness, and sensuality. Such is New York. This is what a city, once honorable, dignified, and intelligent, has become by the overthrow of conservative institutions and the influx of the scum, of Europe. And such, predicts Wendell Phillips, Virginia will be. Heaven forbid!
