Freedom at the North.
If the profound degradation, both social and political, the total want of individual manhood or national self-respect, which will make of the Yankee people an enigma for future historians, were not patent to the whole civilized world; if their ludicrous insolence, their portentous vanity, and their unparalleled mendacity, had not made them the laughing stock of the age; if the robberies, the murders, the rapes, the atrocities of every description, by which they have achieved in this war an immortality of infamy, had not already branded them, for the present and for all future time, as a nation of thieves and cut-throats, whom to compare to the plundering hordes of Attila and Genseric would be a gross injustice to those relatively civilized heathens — the cringing abjection, the trembling servility with which they now submit to the despotism of Lincoln and his military satraps would demonstrate to the most incredulous that they are totally incapable of self government, and that there is no stretch of power which their present masters may not venture upon with the most perfect impunity; no invasion of all the rights dear to freemen to which they will not meanly submit; no infliction of the lash before which they will not abjectly bend the back.The arbitrary arrest and banishment of one of their most eminent statesmen — of one of the very few men of nerve, independence, and civic courage of whom they could boast — is an outrage which has no parallel in the darkest annals of kingly despotism or military usurpation. It is an act the very conception of which would never have entered the mind of a Southern statesman; the bare attempt to carry it out in Great Britain would shake society to its very foundations, and would raise a hurricane before which Queen, Lords and Commons would be swept away like chaff before the wind; and yet this unexampled outrage on personal liberty and the freedom of speech, perpetrated on a man of high position and character, the acknowledged leader of a party which claims, and perhaps with truth, to embrace a majority of the Northern people, is acquiesced in without opposition and with hardly a protest, save the empty vaporings of a few public meetings, in which all the prominent men of that party are afraid to participate, and where the presence of an armed force to overawe the speakers and disperse the assemblage excites no emotion beyond that of mute and passive indignation! Well may one of the few independent journals which the Abolition bayonets have not yet suppressed, commenting on this, exclaim, "the presence among them (the people of the South) of a martyr to free speech and a victim of Government oppression, banished from his own State to find refuge and hospitality in the South, will operate on the Southern mind as a living argument against renewing their allegiance to a Government which has degenerated into a despotism." The Southern mind had no need of this fresh specimen of Northern freedom to arrive at that conclusion. The resolve never again to renew our connexion with the vilest Government and the meanest people "the world ever saw" was formed a long time ago. Oceans of blood now part us forever, and no earthly power can ever bring us again together.
