It is the German residents of Richmond who are said to constitute the majority of these Union men.  All honor to our German friends of the South!  They have received, thus far, too little credit for their staunch adherence to the principles of freedom.  Let them take courage; a day is coming when we shall all be free—­free from every form of slavery! Noch ist die Freiheit nicht verloren!—­’Freedom is not lost as yet.’  Some of them remember that song of old.

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A paragraph has recently gone the rounds, which impudently assures the friends of Emancipation that, unless they promptly desist from further interference or agitation, they will speedily build up a Southern party in the North, which will seriously interfere with the prosecution of the war!

That is to say, that the majority of the people of the North fully acquiesce in the justice of the main principles held by the South—­the only difference of opinion being whether these slavery and slavery-extension doctrines can be practically developed under our federal Union!  Yet we, knowing, seeing, feeling, in this war, the enormously evil effects of the slave system on the free men among whom it exists, are expected to endure and legalize the cause which stirred it up!  Either the South is right or wrong—­there is no escaping the dilemma.  Either it was or was not justly goaded by ‘abolition’ into secession.  If the South is quite right in wishing to preserve slavery intact forever, surely those are in the wrong who would make war on it for wishing to secede from a government which tolerates attacks on legalized institutions!  What a precious paradox have we here?  Yet these virtual justifiers of the South in the great cause of the war, claim to be zealous and forward in punishing that secession which, according to their own views, is constitutional and right!

If slavery be right, then the South is right.  No impartial foreigner could fail to draw this conclusion under the circumstances of this war.  But is it right; we do not say as a thing of the past, and of a rapidly vanishing serf-system, but as an institution of the progressive present?  Witness the words of G. BATELLE, a member of the Western Virginia Constitutional Convention,—­as we write, in session at Wheeling,—­and who has published an address to that body on the question of Emancipation, from which we extract the following:—­

The injuries which slavery inflicts upon our own people are manifold and obvious.  It practically aims to enslave not merely another race, but our own race.  It inserts in its bill of rights some very high-sounding phrases securing freedom of speech; and then practically and in detail puts a lock on every man’s mouth, and a seal on every man’s lips, who will not shout for and swear by the divinity of the system.  It amuses the popular fancy with a few glittering generalities in the fundamental law about the liberty