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402 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. FEBRUARY, 1861. [[line across page]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] will be filled with alarm and agitation. Any compromise which shall leave men free in any corner of the Republic to feel, think, and utter their thoughts, will contain seeds of its own destruction, and leave to the future what ought to be done to-day. Instead of looking around for means of reconciling freedom and slavery, how immeasurably better would it be if, in our national councils, some WILBERFORCE or a BUXTON could arise, and, looking at the subject from the highest point of a wise statesmanship, which is ever in harmony with immutable laws of progress and development, scorning all the petty tricks of the mere politician, propose a plan for the complete abolition of slavery. Is America more selfish and less humane than Russia?-- Is she less honest and benevolent than England? Is she more stolid and insensible to the claims of humanity than the Dutch?-- What should hinder her from following the humane example, and adopting the enlightened policy of those nations? Whether this is done or not, herein, and herein alone is the basis of solid peace, and the country must remain a spectacle of anarchy, and be a byword and a hissing to a mocking earth, till this basis of eternal justice and liberty shall be the foundation of our Union. All compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law. The 'irrepressible conflict' still proceeds, and must continue till the merciful spirit of Christianity and civilization shall be extinguished and cease to have a single heart and voice to plead her cause, or slavery dies. If there is not wisdom and virtue enough in the land to rid the country of slavery, then the next best thing is to let the South go to her own place, and be made to drink the wine cup of wrath and fire, which her long career of cruelty, barbarism and blood shall call down upon her guilty head. _______________________ [[bold]] HON. WM. H. SEWARD MODIFIED. [[/bold]] -- The atmosphere of Washington, pervaded as it is, by the pestilential breath of slavery, seems fatal to the moral stamina of the public men of the North. However bold, brave and uncompromising may be their utterances against slavery at home, it seems impossible for them to stand by their high resolves when once confronted by the lords of the lash, at Washington. This has long been proverbial; but we, with many others, have believed that Mr. SEWARD, under every conceivable pressure, would rise superior to this general rule. Upon the disastrous fall of Mr. WEBSTER, on the seventh of March, 1850, which sent him to his grave muttering regrets for his past, it was believed that no great public man who witnessed that terrible example, comprehending the marked and the melancholy humiliation of the noblest intellect of New England, could be tempted into the same path. But it seems that the warning it gave to all after-comers has not had its full effect upon Mr. SEWARD. Making all allowance for Mr. SEWARD, he seems to us to have fallen about as far as Mr. WEBSTER. If he has not gone so low, he has fallen from a higher point. The Massachusetts Senator, great as he was in mental power, had no such moral support in the esteem and affection of anti-slavery men as that enjoyed by WM. H. SEWARD. He fell far, fell [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] hard, and sank deep; but there was more regret than disappointment at the result.-- With Mr. SEWARD the case is different. When he swerved from the straight line of duty--the exalted principles of liberty--he struck down his friends with a feeling of bitter disappointment. He of all our public men was expected to stand erect in this crisis; and yet he has adopted a tone of all others most conciliatory and compromising. Under all the advantages of high expectation, eager curiosity, the galleries of the Senate crowded to overflowing, the press of the nation ready to catch every word uttered, and the public read to read and ponder every sentiment that fell from his lips--the occasion was one that rarely happens to any individual, however distinguished. The country knew Mr. SEWARD in smooth water and calm weather, and desired to see how he would bear himself in this hour of difficulties, trials and storms. His known imperturbable and philosophical temper, and his almost prophetic sagacity, had taught his friends and his enemies to look to him for those words of wisdom which, while they should strengthen his friends, they would also weaken his foes, and restore peace to the country and safety to the Government. Scattered through all his speeches, from the beginning of his Senatorial career, there are found sentences, paragraphs, embodying in clear and beautiful language the noblest apprehensions of the principles of eternal justice and liberty, and of an invincible determination to apply them and stand by them at all times, in all places, and in every emergency. Take the following, which is but one among many similar passages, delivered under the eyes and in hearing of the CLAYS, WEBSTERS and CALHOUNS of the Senate, and when Mr. SEWARD was but just entering on his Senatorial duties: 'And going upon this principle, I have no hesitation in saying that there is no distinction in my respect or affection between men of one land and of another; between men of one clime and other; between men of one race and another; or between men of one color and another; no distinction but what is based, [[italics]] not upon institution of government [[/italics]], not upon the consent of society, but upon their [[italics]] individual and personal merit. [[/italics]] If the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Dawson) will test this, if he has this sympathy for free negroes which I am rejoiced to hear him proclaim, let him bring in his bill, and the first aye that shall respond to it will be mine--if none should so respond to it before my name should be alphabetically reached, shall be mine. More than that; if his sympathies embrace a class that deserve them still more--the slave--let him bring in his bill for the slave, and my voice for emancipating the slave in any district or territory, shall go for it Nay more; let him show me a way in which I can give a vote for the emancipation of the slaves in his own State, or any State, and I shall feel honored to participate in the movement; and my vote shall be given to sustain it with more joy than it was ever given upon any occasion in my life.' Then, again, as lately as his famous Western tour, he took occasion to indicate his position in the following emphatic and impressive language: 'By no word, no act, [[italics]] no combination into which I might enter [[/italics]], shall any one human being of all the generations to which I belong, much less any class of human beings of [[italics]] any race [[/italics]] or kindred, [[italics]] be oppressed [[/italics]], or kept down in the least degree in their efforts to rise to a higher state of liberty and happiness. .... When- [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] ever the Constitution of the United States requires of me that this hand shall keep down the humblest of the human race, then I will lay down power, place, position, fame, everything, rather than adopt such a construction or such a rule.' Sentiments like these, together with high and noble conduct while Governor of the State of New York, and when in private life, standing up amid clamor, threats of violence in his own town, giving his high professional service to the poor and the outcast, as in the case of the poor idiotic FREEMAN, have stamped him a philanthropist as well as a statesman, and secured him the respect and confidence of all the humane classes of the North. Deep and mournful, therefore, is their grief and disappointment on now finding him at a time like this swerving from the plain line of duty marked out for himself, and virtually abandoning all that individualized and made him distinctive as an American statesman. With an occasion for the display of all heroic qualities, and for the exercise of transcendent abilities; with sedition, rebellion and anarchy in the name of slavery stalking abroad in the land; the business of the country ruthlessly arrested and prostrated by alarmed tyrants; his fellow citizens, pursuing their legitimate business in slave States, ignominiously driven out, in defiance of the Constitution and the laws; State after State drifting away from the Union; forts, arsenals, munitions of war seized, held and appropriated by the traitors and rebels; the American flag hauled down, and a rival flag hoisted in its place over the rightful property of the United States, and American cannon, fired with rebel hands, into Americans; while an imbecile Government sits with folded arms, virtually giving aid and comfort to the traitors;--with all this before him, and much more passing under his eye, Mr. SEWARD makes a speech in the Senate, professedly on the crisis, without saying one word in righteous and indignant reprobation of the high-handed, slaveholding villainies which have brought on the crisis. Instead of rebuking the disturbers of the public peace, and insisting upon good behavior or punishment, he approaches the murderers of liberty and the robbers and assassins of the Government with the language of extreme affection and conciliation. He that had a rope for the neck of JOHN BROWN, because he interfered to put down slavery, has no word of rebuke for the declared slaveholding rebels! He who is ready to punish with death invasion of slave States, has no word of condemnation for a slaveholding invasion of the United States! His speech virtually abandons the 'Higher Law' and 'irrepressible conflict' doctrines in which his name has for the last dozen years been associated. He proposes to give stronger guarantees to slavery than it is now supposed to have in the Constitution of the United States. He is for recapturing the slave, and for leaving the question of the exclusion of slavery from the Territories to be determined by practical considerations. For our life we cannot see in what respect these concessions are better than any yet proposed by STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, or any other doughface. It was not in this way that Mr. SEWARD met the disunion movement in 1850. He then scouted the idea of disunion, treated it as a scare-crow, and would not alter his course a hair's breadth for it. Would that he [[/column 3]]
