"Rule or Ruin."
--To "rule or ruin" the South has been the manifest and controlling principle of the Abolition Government of the United States from the beginning of this war. Its efforts were first directed to rule, but failing after two years trial in that, its whole energies are now bent to ruin. What is this but an admission that it never expects to conquer the South? If it did, why should it labor with all its power to render the South not worth having?It is not merely the ruin of towns and public buildings, and the desolation of fields, or the slaughter of our people, which show the inconsistency of the present destructive policy of the Lincoln dynasty with the anticipation of conquering the Confederate States. Towns may be rebuilt, desolated fields will grow green again, a population grievously thinned by war may be again replenished; but when the only system of labor by which towns can be restored, fields cultivated, and a population supported, is to be torn up by the roots, we may fairly conclude that the architects of such destruction are aiming to ruin rather than to rule.--That the Cotton States can ever be cultivated except by slave labor, is a lunacy which we are not warranted in attributing even to the Washington Cabinet. If they really expect to emancipate the slaves and still make the country profitable, which is the only condition on which the Yankees desire a country, they are the most hopeless madmen the world has ever seen. If the South is to be subjugated, she could not inflict upon her conqueror a more fatal stab than that he is preparing for his own bosom.--Burning the cotton that it may not fall into his hands is nothing to his own plan of destroying the labor by which the cotton is raised. Emancipate the slaves and the cotton-growing States become as profitless to the commerce and manufacturers of the world as Jamaica and St. Domingo. Hence we can only under stand the abolition and destructive policy of the United States Government, by referring it to a foregone conclusion that it will never be able to rob the South permanently, and, therefore, that it will ruin it.
