The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 | Page 7

themselves awhile with the game of secession, and the joys of independent sovereignty, State rights, etc., as Georgia has already begun to do, in nullifying the conscription law on their bogus congress. But eventually their mutual jealousies, their 'quick sense of honor,' their contentious and intestine wars (and nothing else can reasonably be looked for) will bring them under an absolute monarchy, more or less arbitrary, or under the yoke of some foreign power.
* * * * *
The antagonism between free and slave institutions, which we have inferred, from a glance at the peculiar workings of each, finds its complete confirmation in certain statements made by Mr. Calhoun, some twenty years ago, which were to this effect, viz.:
'Democracy in the North is engendering social anarchy; it is tending to the loosening of the bonds of society. Society is not governed by the will of a mob, but by education and talent. Therefore the South, resting on slavery as a stable foundation, is a principle of authority: it must restrain the North; must resist the anarchical influence of the North; must counterbalance the dissolving influence of the North. He upheld slavery because it was a bulwark to counterbalance the dissolving democracy of the North; that the dissolving doctrines of democracy took their rise in England, passed into France, and caused the French Revolution; that they have been carried out in the democracy of the North, and will there ultimate in revolution, anarchy, and dissolution.' (Taken from Horace Greeley, in Independent of December 25th, 1862.)
These are Mr. Calhoun's own words, and he will probably be allowed to be a fair exponent of Southern sentiment: we may gather from these utterances how the free republicanism of the North is regarded by the slave oligarchy.
We cannot forbear adding another statement of Mr. Calhoun, made to Commodore Stuart, as far back as 1812, in a private conversation at Washington, which was in substance as follows, viz.: That the South, on account of slavery, found it necessary to ally herself with one of the political parties; but that if ever events should so turn out as to break this alliance, or cause that the South could not control the Government, that then it would break it up.
Comment upon this is unnecessary. Let no loyal man forget these expressions; they reveal the egg from whence, after fifty years' incubation, this rebellion has been hatched.
But our theme, 'The Value of the Union,' continually expands before us; nevertheless we must bring our article to a close. We do so with the following remarks:
An individual is truly free, not in the degree only in which he governs himself, but in the degree that he governs himself according to the central truth and right of things, or according to the loftiness of the standard by which he regulates his conduct.
It is by the possession of truth, and by obedience to what that truth teaches, that a man rises out of evil and error, and out of bondage thereto.
The possession of truth constitutes intelligence.
But intelligence is worse than useless without obedience to its highest requirements, which is virtue.
Virtue, or morality, in its turn (or decent exterior conduct), is nothing without that which constitutes the soul's topmost and central faculty, viz., the religious sentiment, or that which links the soul to God, the centre of all things. As the parts of any organism, as we have seen, fall into confusion and discord when the central bond is wanting; so do the powers of the soul, when it closes itself by evil doing against the entrance of the beams of life and light that unceasingly flow upon it from God, the spiritual sun and centre of the universe.
Now, as individuals make up the nation, this will be free, and the Union valued and preserved, in the degree that each individual is intelligent, virtuous, and religious.
Upon those, then, who educate the individual, those to whom the infant, the child, the youth, is entrusted, to mould and imbue at the most pliant and receptive period of life--on those, whose office it is to form the young mind into the love and practice of all things good and true, and an abhorrence of their opposites; upon these, the parents, the teachers, and the pastors of the land; upon these, when this hurricane of civil war shall have passed away, do the preservation of this Union and the hopes of mankind more than ever depend. Upon home education and influence; on the schools and on the churches on these three forces centred upon, interwoven, and vitalized by true Christian doctrine, as revealed in the Sacred Scriptures or inspired Word of God, rest the destinies of the American republic. May those who wield them live and act with an ever more vivid and growing consciousness of their great responsibility.

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