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AUGUST, 1861.     DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.     501
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with the Government in suppressing the slaveholding rebels.  They have little cause, in my opinion, for this surprise and this indignation.  We have ourselves to thank for the chilling blasts that come to us upon every breeze from the Eastern world.  We are lukewarm, cursed with halfness, neither hot nor cold.  Let but the Government of the U. S. plant itself upon the immutable truth proclaimed in its own Declaration of Independence, that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and unsheathe the sword to make this truth the law of the land to all its inhabitants, and it will then deserve, and will receive the cordial and earnest sympathy of the lovers of liberty throughout the world.

It is difficult for a people distant from the scene of action, to form an intelligent judgment, except upon very plain and well-defined issues.  They have not time to deal with shadows and to draw nice inferences in respect to relatives and comparatives.  They want plain, blunt, decided and point-blank forces.  Of these they can judge; but where colors are neither black not white, but are blended and mixed, they very naturally fail, while viewing them from a distance, to trace out the lines of difference and division.  We who are here on the ground, very easily see that our Government is in some sort engaged in a war against slavery, for we can see that the Slave Power once conquered and humbled, will to that extent part with its prestige and sink into weakness.  We can see that though slavery shall not be destroyed, and may yet have an existence, its power, if once conquered, will be broken, if not ruined.  But these nice shadings are for us, who are on the ground, and may easily escape the observation and reflection of the world at a distance.  I say again, therefore, that we have no right to be surprised, and no right to complain of the world's judgment upon the present conflict with the slaveholding States.  We have ourselves to condemn.  A lukewarm cause deserves only a lukewarm sympathy.  When we deserve more, we shall receive more.

I have little admiration for slaveholders in any circumstances; and yet I must accord to them the merit of entire frankness and consistency.  They have plunged the country into all the horrors, desolations and abominations of civil war.  But they are consistent.  They had declared their purpose; they have written piracy and robbery upon every fold of the Confederate flag, and displayed the death head and cross-bones in ghastly horror from the mast heads of their pirate ships.-- No one is at a loss to know what they mean.  They hate liberty, and say so.  They are for slavery, and for all its kindred abominations.  Their cause is openly espoused and shamelessly avowed.  Ten thousand times over, give me such an enemy, rather than a half-hearted, luke-warm and halting friend!

The anti-slavery cause has, from the beginning, suffered more from the compromising and temporising spirit of the politicians who have undertaken to serve it, than from the assaults of its open and undisguised enemies--It has often been more injured by the '[[italics]] ifs [[/italics]]' and '[[italics]] buts [[/italics]]' of politicians, than by the brickbats and unsalable eggs of the pro-slavery mob.

We have now had this war with slaveholders on our hands nearly six months.  As yet,
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no great battle has been fought, and no great victory has been won on either side.  Much damage, to be sure, and destruction has taken place.  Business has been destroyed, the glory of the country tarnished, doubt and anxiety spread over the land.  The forces of the two contending powers have been face to face for weeks and months.  Annoying and menacing movements, marches and countermarches, a battery occasionally attacked, a railway train fired into, a picket show down by an assassin, a bridge blown up, a house burnt down, a few rebels quickly arrested and as quickly released, thus far make up the incidents of the war.  And yet, in this unfinished and almost unbegun state of the conflict of arms, while earnest men in every land are looking for a decision which shall be one thing or the other, and set at rest forever the question whether we, the American people have a Government or not--whether a State has a right to secede--whether a part is more than the whole--whether liberty or slavery shall give law to the Republic, to the shame and shall give law to the Republic, to the shame and confusion of all beholders--the mixed and ill-assorted head, part iron and part clay, of Compromise looms above the sea of our National troubles.  Where, under the whole heavens, among what people but the American people could there be, in such a state of facts, even a possibility of compromise?  How shall we account for it, even among ourselves?  I will tell you.  American society, American religion, American government, and every department of American life since the formation of the present Government, with freedom in one section and slavery in the other, have naturally parted with their native vigor and purity, and degenerated into a compromise, so that an American wherever met with is simply a bundle of contradictions, incongruities and absurdities.  For every truth he utters, he has a qualification, and for every principle he lays down, he has an exception.  All his doctrines are accompanied with '[[italics]] ifs [[/italics]]' and '[[italics]] buts. [[/italics]]'  The attempt to reconcile slavery with freedom has dethroned our logic and converted our statesmanship into stultified imbecility.  It has given three tongues to all our politicians, a tongue for the North and a tongue for the South, and a double tongue for the nation.

You are never sure of the meaning of one of these statesmen until you have heard him in the three distinct characters which he is required to assume.  Take Mr. WM. H. SEWARD for example.  Standing in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, speaking with a Northern tongue, he is plain, direct and to the purpose.  He there proclaims the irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom, and assures us that wherever these powers are brought into a State or Territory, that one must inevitably fall before the other.  But this is in Rochester, on the borders of Lake Ontario, five hundred miles from the Capital.  Listen to the same man in the Senate of the United States, and you will learn from his lips that the irrepressible conflict is quite a repressible one--that there need to be no trouble between the labor States and the capital States, if slavery were not pressed into politics.  Mr. SEWARD is a fair sample of the political honesty which eighty years of the educating influences of American slavery, and of the attempt to reconcile what from the nature of the case is irreconcilable.  As I said of the late Mr. DOUGLAS a few Sundays ago, Mr. SEWARD simply [[/column 2]]

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represents the nation, or rather the Northern people, whose sensibilities have been blunted and paralyzed by the poisoned atmosphere in which we all live, and move, and have our being.

But is there really any danger that our Government is again to be debauched by a new compromise with slavery?  My answer is, that straws show the way of the wind.--What has been done, may be done again.--We live in an atmosphere of compromise.--Very much can be said against the probability of such a termination of the present war.  About the strongest consideration which can be urged against the probability of such compromise, is the fact that neither party, the North nor the South, could, at this stage of the war, agree to any terms of accommodation or peace which would not cover them with the derision and scorn of mankind.  Were the South to-morrow to lay down their arms on condition that such an act on their part would place them, in respect to constitutional rights, precisely where they were before, the Government of the United States could not, without degradation and without deep injustice to the whole people, accept the overture.  Nothing can be plainer than the obligation resting on the Government to demand the fullest indemnity and restitution.  A failure on its part to make an example of traitors and rebels would leave to the future historian a catalogue of calamities.  For it would open the door to a repetition of all the horrors which have attended, and may further attend our present National troubles.  It would leave behind it the same root of sectional bitterness, the same sectional pride, the same sectional contempt for Northern manhood and valor upon which Southern insolence has been able to foment the present rebellion.  Other DAVISES, TOOMBSES, MASONS and WISES would arise and re-enact the deeds of their prototypes.  Nevertheless, we are in danger of a compromise.  Telegrams from Washington, though often false, are sometimes true, and among the latest rumors of the lightning is that the Confederate Provisional Government has its ardent friends now at Washington in the garb of devoted Union men, openly suggesting terms of compromise between the Government and the rebels.  I know something of the fluctuations of public sentiment, and to what extremes masses of men may be carried in one direction to-day, and in another tomorrow.  The experience of the last few months demonstrates the oscillating character of popular feeling.  The clamor for war against the rebels reached our ears almost before the clamor for compromise had died away on the breeze.

Another reason for apprehending a new attempt at compromise, is the fact that we at the North are essentially a peaceable people.  War is not our vocation.  It is looked upon and dreaded as among the worst calamities.--When, therefore, there shall come, as there doubtless will come, one or two great battles, bringing great suffering and slaughter upon our side, as well as that of the South, we may look out for eloquent denunciations of the horrors of war and earnest appeals in favor of the adoption of some new arrangement which shall arrest the effusion of blood.

Herein lies our chief danger--a danger involving the loss of all for which the war was undertaken.  To be forewarned, however, is
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