policy of military emancipation is an ultimate necessity, and there is nobody more likely to put it in effective operation than a certain gentleman who lately wrote an eloquent letter to his Governor on the horrors of slave-insurrection.  No doubt insurrection is a terrible thing, but so is all war, and every man of humanity approaches either with a shudder.  But if the truth were told, it would be that the Anglo-Saxon habitually despises the negro because he is not an insurgent, for the Anglo-Saxon would certainly be one in his place.  Our race does not take naturally to non-resistance, and has far more spontaneous sympathy with Nat Turner than with Uncle Tom.  But be it as it may with our desires, the rising of the slaves, in case of continued war, is a mere destiny.  We must take facts as they are.

Insurrection is one of the risks voluntarily assumed by Slavery,—­and the greatest of them.  The slaves know it, and so do the masters.  When they seriously assert that they feel safe on this point, there is really no answer to be made but that by which Traddles in “David Copperfield” puts down Uriah Heep’s wild hypothesis of believing himself an innocent man.  “But you don’t, you know,” quoth the straightforward Traddles; “therefore, if you please, we won’t suppose any such thing.”  They cannot deceive us, for they do not deceive themselves.  Every traveller who has seen the faces of a household suddenly grow pale, in a Southern city, when some street tumult struck to their hearts the fear of insurrection,—­every one who has seen the heavy negro face brighten unguardedly at the name of John Brown, though a thousand miles away from Harper’s Ferry,—­has penetrated the final secret of the military weakness which saved Washington for us and lost the war for them.

It is time to expose this mad inconsistency which paralyzes common sense on all Southern tongues, so soon as Slavery becomes the topic.  These same negroes, whom we hear claimed, at one moment, as petted darlings whom no allurements can seduce, are denounced, next instant, as fiends whom a whisper can madden.  Northern sympathizers are first ridiculed as imbecile, then lynched as destructive.  Either position is in itself intelligible, but the combination is an absurdity.  We can understand why the proprietor of a powder-house trembles at the sight of flint and steel; and we can also understand why some new journeyman, being inexperienced, may regard the peril without due concern.  But we should decide either to be a lunatic, if he in one breath proclaimed his gunpowder to be incombustible, and at the next moment assassinated a visitor for lighting a cigar on the premises.  A slave population is either contented and safe, or discontented and unsafe; it cannot at the same time be friendly and hostile, blissful and desperate.