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Charles Dickens..final

Continued from last.

Vol. 6

(Continued from the "American Disunion" by Charles Dickens)

"THE MORRILL TARIFF"

...If a measure like this were passed by collusion of interests- which the American legislator familiarly recognizes as” log rolling”- “You help to roll my log, and I’ll help to roll yours”- if it were so passed and its doubtful fate by delay, lobbying, and a final rush, so much the more was it disgraceful to the Union, much the more might it disgust those to whom it was the crowning injury in a course of injurious legislation. Congress has met again and added to the measure, making it more, not less, protective and restrictive. That it disgusts the best half of the North heartily hope; we see also that it has the last threads which bound the North and South together. The severance, already far advanced, needed but one little stroke along the whole line of division.
In each year since 1837, the North has taken at least eight million of pounds, for the avowed purpose of protecting its own manufacturers and shipping. Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state has declared that would submit to this extortion only while it had not strength for resistance. When the day resistance came, the dishonest compromise attributed to Mr Seward is a suggestion to the Southerners of Mexico and Cuba for themselves, and Canada for the North. The secession, six months after it was complete was unresisted by the North, and the departure South Carolina from the compact was not as departure of an English county from its loyalty, but of a sovereign state with its own legislature laws and law courts, its own civil and military organizations. Whether secession be a constitutional right it is not worth while discuss by refinements of interpretation. The whole argument turns on a nice distinction between fact and law. What question is this where every feeling and interest of one side calls for political partition, and every pocket interest calls on the other side for union, with violence enough to breed a civil war, horrible almost beyond precedent. The conflict is between semi independent communities, differing in many cases as widely as possible in manners, laws, and interests, and all jealous of their freedom.

Each state has been the country of its citizens, a country not seldom larger in itself than France or Germany. Of all these countries, over a vast region the people declare the Union is no longer advantageous to them. And all this, as the Oxford professor of international law has well observed, “ in a country which has treasured the right of revolt as the charter of its own freedom, and regarded the exercise of it as restrained only by motives of prudence, and needing no public justification except out of ‘a decent respect for the opinions of mankind;’ a country- the only one in the world which has made the theory of a social compact the basis of its institutions; which was the first to promulgate formally the doctrine that ‘all just governments derive their power from the consent of the governed,’ and has never ceased to applaud every application of that doctrine abroad, nor to teach and proclaim it at home. So the case stands, and under all the passion of parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils.

While these pages are passing through the press, a new proof has arrived from the States that the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands solely a fiscal quarrel. In the political heart of the North itself a separate secession is threatened by the Abolitionists. The standard they have raised, as if it were a new one, other than that under which the South is being fought is Emancipation of the Slaves. Against abolition, the government, following up the policy distinctly indicated by its dismissal Fremont, rage quite as fiercely as they rage against the Southern Confederates.

Freedom in almost any form never appeals sympathy in vain; and a direct issue in form, even with the slenderest hopes of realization, would win back those sympathies the denial of which the North bitterly complains of. But unfortunately Abolitionists add the arming of the slaves to their programme or “platform”. This the government profess to be too horrible a measure to be entertained without a shudder. Such a servile war would indeed, if successfully instigated, be too dreadful to be deliberately thought of. It would be an awful risk to try such a proof of fidelity which the South attributes to its slaves: if the slaves love and respect their masters as much as the masters say they do, arms, if put into their hands might possibly be turned against their loved and respected proprietors, in a way little short of extermination.

[All The Year Round, A Weekly Journal, by Charles Dickens, Sep. 1861-Mar. 1862. Vol. 6]
_________________________
David Upton

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