in some part or other of the South.  And not upon negroes only; the Edinburgh Review, in a recent number, gave the hideous details of the burning alive of an unfortunate Northern huckster by Lynch law, on mere suspicion of having aided in the escape of a slave.  What must American slavery be, if deeds like these are necessary under it?—­and if they are not necessary and are yet done, is not the evidence against slavery still more damning?  The South are in rebellion not for simple slavery; they are in rebellion for the right of burning human creatures alive.

But we are told, by a strange misapplication of a true principle, that the South had a right to separate; that their separation ought to have been consented to, the moment they showed themselves ready to fight for it; and that the North, in resisting it, are committing the same error and wrong which England committed in opposing the original separation of the thirteen colonies.  This is carrying the doctrine of the sacred right of insurrection rather far.  It is wonderful how easy and liberal and complying people can be in other people’s concerns.  Because they are willing to surrender their own past, and have no objection to join in reprobation of their great-grandfathers, they never put themselves the question what they themselves would do in circumstances far less trying, under far less pressure of real national calamity.  Would those who profess these ardent revolutionary principles consent to their being applied to Ireland, or India, or the Ionian Islands.  How have they treated those who did attempt so to apply them?  But the case can dispense with any mere argumentum ad hominem.  I am not frightened at the word rebellion.  I do not scruple to say that I have sympathized more or less ardently with most of the rebellions, successful and unsuccessful, which have taken place in my time.  But I certainly never conceived that there was a sufficient title to my sympathy in the mere fact of being a rebel; that the act of taking arms against one’s fellow-citizens was so meritorious in itself, was so completely its own justification, that no question need be asked concerning the motive.  It seems to me a strange doctrine that the most serious and responsible of all human acts imposes no obligation on those who do it of showing that they have a real grievance; that those who rebel for the power of oppressing others, exercise as sacred a right as those who do the same thing to resist oppression practised upon themselves.  Neither rebellion nor any other act which affects the interests of others, is sufficiently legitimated by the mere will to do it.  Secession may be laudable, and so may any other kind of insurrection; but it may also be an enormous crime.  It is the one or the other, according to the object and the provocation.  And if there ever was an object which, by its bare announcement, stamped rebels against a particular community as enemies of mankind, it is the one professed by the South.  Their right to separate is the right which Cartouche or Turpin would have had to secede from their respective countries, because the laws of those countries would not suffer them to rob and murder on the highway.  The only real difference is that the present rebels are more powerful than Cartouche or Turpin, and may possibly be able to effect their iniquitous purpose.