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442  [[centered]] DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. [[/centered]]   April, 1861.
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EXTRACTS FROM MR. WENDELL PHILLIPS'S [[sic]] SPEECH ON 'PROGRESS.'
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The gain to-day is, we have a [[italics]] people. [[/italics]] [[dash]] Under their vigilant eyes, mindful of their sturdy purpose, sustained by their determination, many of our politicians [[italics]] act [[/italics]] much better.  And out of this popular heart is [[italics]] growing [[/italics]] a Constitution which will wholly supersede that of 1787.

A few years ago, while Pierce was President, the Republican party dared to refuse the appropriations for support of government [[dash]] the most daring act ever ventured in a land that holds Bunker Hill and Brandywine. [[dash]] They dared to persevere some twenty or thirty days.  It seems a trifle; but it is a very significant straw.  Then for weeks when Banks was elected; and a year ago, again, the whole government was checked till the Republicans put their Speaker in the chair. Now the North elects her President, the South secedes. I suppose we shall be bargained away into compromise. I know the strength and virtue of the farming West. I is one of the bright spots that our sceptre tends there, rather than to the seaboard. Four to eight years hence, when this earthquake will repeat itself, the West may be omnipotent, and we shall see brave things.

But now, spite of Lincoln's wishes, I fear he will never be able to stand against Seward, Adams, half the Republican wire-pullers and the sea-board. But even now, if Seward and the rest had stood firm, as Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, Wade, and Lovejoy, and the [[italics]] Tribune [[/italics]] have hitherto done, I believe you might have polled the North, and had a response, three to one. 'Let the Union go to pieces, rather than yield one inch!' I know no sublimer hour in history. The sight of these two months is compensation for a life of toil. [[dash]] Never let Europe taunt us again that our blood is wholly cankered by gold. Our poeple stood, willing their idolized government should go to pieces for an idea. True, other nations have done so. England in 1640 [[dash]] France in 1791 [[dash]] our colonies in 1775. Those were proud moments. But to-day touches a nobler height. Their idea was their own freedom. To-day, the idea, loyal to which our people willingly see their Union wrecked, is largely the hope of justice to a dependent, helpless, hated race. Revolutions never go backward. The live force of a human pulse beat can rive the dead lumber of government to pieces. Chain the Hellespont, Mr. Xerxes-Seward, before you dream of balking the Northern heart of its purpose [[dash]] freedom to the slave! The old sea never laughed at Persian chains more haughtily than do we at Congressional compromises. [[ * * * *]]

Compromise risks insurrection [[dash]] the worst door at which freedom can enter. Let universal suffrage have free sway, and the ballot supersedes the bullet. But let an arrogant and besotted minority curb the majority by tricks like these, and when you have compromised away Lincoln, you revive John Brown. On this point of insurrection, let me say a word. Men talk of the peace of the South under our present government. It is no real peace. With the whites, it is only that bastard peace which the lazy Roman lived [[dash]] [[italics]] utse apricaret [[/italics]] [[dash]] that he might sun himself. [[dash]] It is only safe idleness, sure breeder of mischief. With the slave, it is only war in disguise. Under that mask is hid a war keeper in its pains, and deadlier in its effects, than an open fight. As the Latia adage runs [[dash]] [[italics]] mars gravior sub pace latet [[/italics]] [[dash]] war bitter for its disguise.

Thirty years devoted to earnest use of moral means show how sincere our wish that this question should have a peaceful solution. If your idols [[dash]] your Websters, Clays, Calhouns, Sewards, Adamses [[dash]] had done their duty, so it would have been. Not ours the guilt of this storm, or of the future, however bloody. But I hesitate not to say that I prefer an insurrection which frees the slave in ten years to slavery for a century. A slave I pity. A rebellious slave I respect. I saw now, as I said ten years ago [[dash]] I do not shrink from the toast with which Dr. Johnson fla-
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vored his Oxford port 'Success to the first insurrection of the blacks in Jamaica!' I do not shrink from the sentiment of Southey, in a letter to Duppa [[dash]] 'There are scenes of tremendous horro, which I could smile at by Mercey's side. An insurrection which should make the negroes masters of the West Indies is one' I believe both these sentiments are dictated by the highest humanity. I know what anarchy is. I know what civil war is [[dash]] I can imagine the scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave population must march to their rights. They are dreadful [[dash]] And yet, I do not know, that, to an enlightened mind, a scene of civil war is any more sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty years of slavery. Take the broken hearts; the bereaved mothers; the infant, wrung from the hands of its parents; the husband and wife torn asunder; every right trodden under foot; the blighted hope, the imbruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions [[dash]] sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted into sensuality, herded with beasts [[dash]] who have walked over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their graves, and where is the battle-field, however ghastly, that is not white [[dash]] white as an angel's wing compared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two hundred years? [[dash]] Do you love mercy? Weigh out the fifty thousand hearts that have beaten their last pulse amid agonies of though and suffering fancy faints to think of; and the fifty thousand mothers who, with sickening sense, watch for footsteps that are not wont to tarry long in their coming, and soon find themselves left to tread the pathway of life alone [[dash]] add all the horrors of cities sacked and lands laid waste [[dash]] and then weigh them all against some young girl sent to the auction-block, some man like that taken from our Court House and carried back into Georgia; multiply this individual agony into four millions; multiply that into centuries; and that into all the relations of father and child, husband and wife; heap on all the deep moral degradation both of the oppressor and the oppressed, and tell me if Waterloo or Thermopylae can claim one tear from the eye even of the tenderest spirit of mercy, compared with this daily system of hell amid the most civilized and Christian people on the face of the earth!

No, I confess I am not a non-resistant. The reason why I have advised the slave to be guided by a policy of peace is because he has had, hitherto, no chance. If he had one [[dash]] if he had as good a chance as those who went up to Lexington years ago, I should call him the basest recreant that ever deserted wife and child, if he did not vindicate his liberty by his own right hand.

Mr Richard Dana, Jr., says in such a contest his sympathies would be with his own race. I confess mine would be with the right. I feel bound to add my doubt whether a slave insurrection would be a bloody one. In all revolutions, except the French, the people have always shown themselves merciful [[dash]] Witness Switzerland, St. Domingo, Hungary, Italy. Tyranny sours more than suffering. [[dash]] The Conservative hates the Abolitionist more than we do him. The South hates the North. The master speaks ten bitter words of the slave, where the slave speaks five of the master. [[* * * * *]]

Suppose we welcome disunion, manfully avow our real sentiment, 'liberty and equality,' and draw the line at the Potomac. We do not want the border States. Let them go be welcome to the forts, take the capital with them. What to us is a hot house city, empty seats, and useless marble? Where Macgregor sits is the head of the table. Active brains, free lips and cunning hands make empires. [[dash]] Paper capitals are vain. Of course, we must assume a right to buy out Maryland and Delaware. Then, by running our line at the Potomac, we close the irrepressible conflict, and have homogeneous institutions. Then we part friends. The Union thus ended, the South no longer hates the North. Cuba she cannot have. France, England and ourselves forbid. If she spread over Central America, 
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that will bring no cause of war to a Northern confederacy. We are no fillibusters. Her nearness to us there cannot harm us. Let Kansas witness that while Union fettered her, and our national banner clung to the flag-saff heavy with blood, we still made good Geo. Cannings boast, 'Where that banner is panted, foreign dominion shall not come.' [[dash]] With a government heartily on his side, and that flag floating in the blessings of twenty million of freemen, the loneliest settler in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains will sleep fearless.

Why, then, should there not be peace between two such confederacies? There must be. Le me show you why:

1st. The laws of trade will bind us together as they now do in all other lands. This side of the ocean, at least, we are not living in feudal times, when princes made war for ambition. We live in days when men of common sense go about their daily business, while frightened kings are flying along the highways. Leave neighborhood and trade alone, and we shall be at peace. Observe, only Northerners are lynched at the South now. Spaniards, French, Scotch are safe. [[dash]] When English Captain Vaughan is tarred and feathered, the Mayor offers a reward, and the grand jury indict. After a fair, sensible disunion, such as I have described, a Boston man will be as well off as Captain Vaughan. At any rate, disunion could not make the two sections any more at war than they are now. Any change in this respect would be an improvement. If the North and Mexico had touched boundaries, would they ever have quarreled? Nothing but Southern fillibusterism, which can never point North, ever embroiled us with Mexico. To us in future the South will be another Mexico [[dash]] too weak, too intent on her own broils to attack us.

The South cannot make war on any one. Suppose the fifteen States hang together a year [[dash]] which is almost an impossibility [[dash]] 1st, they have given bonds in two thousand million of dollars [[dash]] the value of their slaves [[dash]] to keep the peace.

2d. They will have enough to do to attend to the irrepressible conflict at home. Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, will be their Massachusetts [[dash]] Winter Davis, Blair and Cassius Clay, their Seward and Garrison.

3d. The Gulf States will monopolize all the offices. A man must have Gulf principles to belong to a healthy party. Under such a lead, disfranchised Virginia, in opposition, will not have much heart to attack Pennsylvania.

4th. The census shows that the border States are pushing their slaves South. Fear of their free Northern neighbors will quicken the process, and so widen the breach between gulf and border States by making one constantly more and the other less slave States. Free trade in sugar bankrupts Louisiana. [[dash]] Free trade in man bankrupts Virginia. Free trade generally lets two-thirds of the direct taxation rest on the numerous, richer, and more comfortable whites of the border States; hence further secession. Such a despotism, with every third man black and a foe, will make no wars.

Why should it attack us? We are not a cannon thundering at its gates. We are not an avalanche overhanging its sunny vales. [[dash]] Our influence, that of freedom, is only the air, penetrating everywhere, like heat, permeating all space. The South cannot stand isolated on a glass cricket. The sun will beat her, and electricity convulse. She must outwit them before she can get rid of ideas. A fevered child in July might as well strike at the sun, as the South attack us for that, the only annoyance we can give her [[dash]] the sight and influence of our noble civilization.

Disunion is gain. I venture the assertion, in the face of State street, that of any five Northern men engaged in Southern trade exclusively, four will end in bankruptcy. It disunion sifts such commerce, the North will lose nothing.

I venture the assertion, that seven at least of the Southern States receive from the Gov-
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