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711      DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.      SEPTEMBER 1862
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needs it to the full as much as we.  She will soon perceive, if she does not already, that two parts of one nation, or even two conterminous nations, can never again exist in amity on this continent, one slave and the other free.  She cannot but see that fugitive slave law difficulties, if no others existed, would suffice to prevent this.

It is not the question whether a paper declaration, easily issued, will or will not be followed by a thousand practical difficulties.——The uprooting of an ancient and gigantic abuse always involves such.  Nor should we be called upon to predict in advance (for who can entirely foresee?) how each of these will ultimately be solved.  The true question is, whether greater difficulties, even insugerable ones, do not beset any other policy.  Pressed home as we are, to avoid obstacles is impossible.  We can but select the least formidable.  The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils.

When dangers surround us, we must walk, in a measure, by faith.  Let us do what we can, and leave God to the issue.  We may best trust to Him when we enter his path of progress.  He aids those who walk in it.

I feel assured that final success awaits us in pursuing such a path.  And I see no other road out of the darkness.

ROBERT DALE OWEN.
New York, July 23, 1862.
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LETTER FROM THE DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE TO GEN. RALHNER.
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The following from the Executive Committee of the Democratic League of New York, was sent to Gen. Hunter on Friday:

NEW YORK, Aug. 7, 1862.

Major General Hunter, Port Royal, S. C.:

DEAR SIR:  The undersigned, the Executive Committee of the Democratic League of this city, tender you their respects, as well as thanks, for the stand taken by you in your late letter to Rev. Dr. Tyng.

The committee appreciate your force of reasoning, and the necessity of a decided policy on the part of the Government, the people and military authorities.

The conflict now going on is a broader one than is commonly imagined.  It is a league on the one hand between slaveholders, allied with European aristocracy, to denationalize republican government in a large portion of the United States; on the other hand, it is the democratic principle in the free government struggling against the combined antagonisms of a privileged class, in order to maintain is ascendancy in the entire Union.  This is the great issue, and all other matters are merely incidental agencies to work out the result upon the main question.

It was truly said by Mr. Garnett, of Virginia, in a letter to Mr. Trescott, of South Carolina, written in 1851:  'You well object to the term democracy.  Democracy, in its original and philosophical sense, is indeed incompatible with slavery, and the whole system of Southern society.'  This declaration embraces the platform of the Southern rebellion.  It constituted the entire basis of reasoning that started the seeds of rebellion into growth, and which, in the space of thirty years nurtured treason into culmination——The political adventurers and slave-holders South, and the more intelligent portion of the people North, understand this question alike.  Were it generally and well understood there would be little difficulty in settling the question at once, through the arbitrament of preponderating force.  If the twenty-six or seven millions composing the mass of free labor North and South understood the question in its true light, the whole matter would be disposed of with little more effusion of blood.——Its settlement would also result in a firmer and better establishment of the principles of free Government.

Slavery perpetuation through the abrogation of a Government of majorities is the war platform of the so-called Confederate Government.  The idea of slavery perpetuation upon the ruins and prostration of the democratic principle is the stimulating virus
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that is now sustaining the desperate efforts of the Southern conspiracy.  Whether we are fighting to preserve the cause of the rebellion, while attempting to crush the rebellion itself; whether we are fighting to maintain human bondage, while rebels are making the continuation of such bondage the cause of war, are questions that now seem pertinent.  If we are fighting to maintain the democratic principle, shall we succeed best by upholding or by overthrowing its antagonisms?

It seems to us that your letter contains a clear and concise view of the question.  we much fear that nothing but the increased effusion of blood, growing out of the present confusion in the public mind, will bring the people to unanimity as to the direction of the blows which must be struck before this warfare closes.

With ardent wishes for the welfare of the country, and many personal regards to yourself, we are very truly yours, &c.

Chas. P. Kirkland, 
John J. Speed,
Thos. Ewbank, 
Geo. P. Nelson,
Henry O'Rielly, 
Henry C. Gardiner,
Lorenzo Sherwood, 
Pierrepont Isham,
Executive Committee.
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PERSECUTION OF NEGROES.
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Months ago, when the Rebel cause seemed at is last gasp, its partisans in the loyal Stats were secretly impelled to get up a diversion in its favor by instigating riotous assaults on the unarmed and comparatively defenseless Blacks of our Northern cities.  In furtherance of this plot, stories were stared that thousands of negroes at Washington, Fortress Monroe, and elsewhere, were being subsisted in idleness at the public cost; next, that fugitive slaves were so abundant in Chester County, Pa. and its vicinity that they were taking the bread out of the mouths of white laborers by working for ten cents per day!  This was of course a falsehood, as the absence of laboring men in the army has produced a scarcity of laborers in Chester County, as almost everywhere else; no tolerably efficient white laborer having failed of finding constant employment there at $1 to $1 1/2 per day.  We published repeated and explicit contradictions of the lie, but to no purpose--the ignorant, stolid, envious wretches who could be impelled to assault and despoil the poor fugitives, taking good care never to look into The Tribune.

Attacks on the negro population were commenced weeks ago at Cincinnati, and have since been tried at Evansville, Ind., and Toledo, Ohio.  In the latter place, they have been traced directly to the instigation of emissaries from this City.  Probably no one has given them a whisper of encouragement who would not split his throat in cheering I Jeff Davis if that potentate should ride by h m in triumph.

The recent attack on the negro women and children employed in a tobacco manufactory at Brooklyn is most disgraceful to our sister city, and - if it be true that they were forewarned of it - to our Metropolitan Police, or at least to the Brooklyn branch of it. That a ruffian mob should be enabled to hold women and children in mortal terror for hours, gratifying meantime their groundless malice by earnest and all but successful attempts to roast them alive in their workshop, is a stain which Brooklyn will not soon efface. 

The Black population of this country have been here for generations. They were brought here by force, and it is now gravely proposed that they be expelled by like force. We believe they can do better in tropic regions than here, and we shall advise them to migrate when they can do so freely; but so long as they shall be persecuted and abused here with intent to drive them into exile, we trust they will stand upon their rights as men and natives of the country, and utterly refuse to go. 

It is a standing complaint that negroes will not work, and some of them justify it. These, however, are seldom exposed to Democratic abuse and assault. The industrious and frugal, who earn their own living and mind their 
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own business, are almost always selected for ill usage. Those who can find nothing to do are cursed as paupers and consumers of unearned bread; but let one of them go to work, and at once he becomes an object of Democratic malevolence and mendacity. he is working too cheaply, or he has a job that a White man would like, or some other ground of assault is imagined or invented. It would be sheer affectation to seem not to see that all this negro-hate is fomented with vote-catching intent by the basest and most unprincipled school of politicians that God in His inscrutable wisdom ever permitted to curse a country. Those 'nurseries of Democracy,' the grog shops - and mainly the worst of them - supply the impelling force, the motive power, of every anti-negro mob. The calculation is that every such mob yields some grist to the Democratic mill. The leaders who are so fierce for 'the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is, and the negroes as they are - and of whom it would take as many to put down a Pro-Slavery Rebellion as of snowballs to boil a teakettle - regard these anti-negro riots with serene complacency. Had Wood continued Mayor of our City, with a Police to match, we should have had any number of them on this side of the East River. Should they be attempted now, we trust they will be signally punished: if not, the Police Board and its subordinates will suffer seriously in public estimation. Let every rascal who incites, however slily, an attack upon the humble defenseless Blacks of our City, be arrested and brought to punishment. 

Meantime, let us be thankful that the sympathy still cherished in the Free States for the Slaveholders' Rebellion dare take no form more decided or less cowardly than that of attacks on poor negroes for the crime of earning honest bread. 'The sum of all villainies has still may devotees among us: let us rejoice that their large ambition and deadly hate can find no broader, braver outlet than this - N. Y. Tribune.

Words in Season. - the Lounger,' in the last number of Harper's Weekly, says: 

'Let us suppress the abolitionists,' cries some slack-witted orator, 'and the rebellion will end!' Of course it will, you dear soul; and if all your fellow citizens had been of your calibre and kidney, there would have been no rebellion at all. Hampden and his friends had said, 'Let us suppress these fellows who cry out against ship-money,' England would have quietly submitted to the tyranny of the Stuarts. If Otis and Patrick Henry had shouted, Hurrah for King George and the Stamp Act!' there would have been no bloody revolution. If Mirabeau and the French people had bellowed, Hurrah for starvation; aristocrats forever!' all the trouble in France would have speedily ended. To be sure, every right would have been annihilated, every liberty destroyed and a few rich and remorseless people would have governed France, but there would have been no difficulty, except moral rot and general national decay. 

'Let us suppress the abolitionists!' But suppose you begin at the beginning. First subdue the common sense of the people of the country; then you may subdue those who influence it. It is not what you call, with an amusing persistence, abolitionism, which caused the war, but the opening of the eyes of the people so that they see. The people of this country know perfectly well that slavery is at the bottom of this rebellion. If there had been no slavery there would have been no war; just as there would have been no abolitionism. - The temperance movement springs from drunkenness; and when a drunken man tries to kill his wife, don't you think that the teetotalers are responsible for it?

Slavery was trying to kill the country. It had almost succeeded. 'Watch! watch!' shouted the abolitionists' Slavery, maddened that its crime was discovered, shot and stabbed right and left. 'There! there!' cry the sensible Wickliffe and Company - 'this comes of calling the wa'ch Why the devil can't you hold your tongues? Let us suppress these fellows that cry watch! watch! and all will be quiet again! 

'Certainly; a dead dog or a dead nation are not perfectly quiet. And a nation of freemen throttled, with its own consent by a slave system like ours, is the deadest and meanest of all dead dogs.' 
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