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Prince Bedreddin's Tarts; or, the Consequences of an Indigestion

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The Shot in the Eye. A True Story of Texas Border Life, by C.

The Late Acting President

The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves, from the German of HAUff, by the Author of Giafar al Barmeki

WILKINS EIMI

The Song of the Bell, from SCHILLER

31

144

211

215

The Cabman's Story, from DUMAS

The Literature of Fiction, by A. Davezac

The Old Beggar, by R. S. S. ANDROS

225

268

The Astrologer's Tower, from Hoffmann, by Mrs. E. F. ELLET

The Journal of an African Cruizer, by an Officer of the U. S. Navy

The Young American, by ALEXANDER H. EVERETT

The Friends, from the German of TIECK

The Oregon Question

329

346

482, 533

495

496

523

The Bridal of Pennacook, a Poem. By J. G. WHITTIER

Travels and Writings of HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT

The Faro Table. From the German of HOFFMANN

The Tea Fairy. A Chinese Legend. By Mrs. E. F. ELLET

The Power of Words, by EDGAR A. POE

Undine, and Sintram and his Companions

WALKER, ROBERT J.

537

552

555

585

602

509

Verses to a Child with some Wild Flowers

What is the Reason? How Much Land and Property and I have none

Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, by Mrs. E. F. Ellet

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ABOLITIONISM has certainly grown now into an important political Fact, to whose demands upon our notice, if to neither its entreaties nor its arguments, we cannot refuse, at least an anxious, if neither an admiring nor approving at tention. It is not to be denied, that at the late election-partly from accidental circumstances, and partly from its own strength-yet still practically as a fact-it has been able to hold quivering in its mad hand the balance of power between the two great parties of the country. It was strong enough to attract to itself that court which the selfishness of politics addresses only to important political elements of power. It saw itself flattered, besieged, importuned, all but knelt to, by one of the two contending parties; and though the other held sternly aloof from it, yet even that other did not affect to regard its decision without apprehension. Special missions were sent to it, of high personal weight and influence, and almost officially recognized and accredited-by private letters, whatever public disavowals "our friend John Speed Smith" may have concurred with others in deeming indispensable. And when all failed-or rather resulted in only that partial success which was practically equivalent to failure-when the main bulk of the Democratic portion of Abolitionism, and a portion of its Whig constituent parts, refused to listen to he voice of the charmer, and vote for Clay, so that 15,000 of its votes in the ba'ance State, New York, were still cast for their own candidate, an excess

of 10,000 beyond that by which the Democracy succeeded in carrying the State, and with it the Union-how were they not assailed by the defeated party as having done it! Has it indeed come to this? Has Abolitionism held in its power the arbitrament of this great national issue? Has it been first imploringly courted to elect one President, and then resentfully reproached with having elected another? Verily, then, small as is the respect we have accorded, or are disposed to accord it-verily, Political Abolitionism is no joke. It is a Something, even though it be only a wild bull loose in the streets. When we recall some of the recollections of the late canvass, we cannot refuse to confess how narrowly we have escaped being fatally gored by its horn. Should we have thus escaped if Mr. Clay had not published his Alabama pro-Texas Letters? It is a question never now to be answered; but one on which when Mr. Clay himself sometimes reflects, how deeply may he not deplore the fatal kindness of his mistaken parents, in ever teaching him to make his first infantine pothook!

Nor is New York the only State in which, as between the two great existing political divisions of the people, Abolitionism holds the balance of power. It is true also of Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont-perhaps

we might add others. In the recent election, it is certain that it has not shown its full strength. It has been divided, one of the principal issues involved being of a

character to draw off a large section of its Whig portion-(and a considerable majority of it is undoubtedly Whig in its origin and continued sympathies) and to give it to Clay. And this was the source of the interest with which we of the Democratic Party looked on as we stood by, and witnessed all the intense effort made by our opponents to carry off the whole body of the Abolitionists on the strength of the antislavery elements which they, and unfortunately the Administration, had managed to mix up into the Texas question. We only feared lest they should carry off the whole, both the Whig and Democratic portions. Had they not succeeded to the extent to which they did with the former (and perhaps a small number of the latter), our majority in this State would have been larger. Their vote at the election of November, 1843, was upwards of 17,000 in the State of New York. They counted confidently on a vote of at least 25,000 this year. The difference between those numbers is but a reasonable allowance for the growth which has undoubtedly taken place in their strength within the past year. Full 10,000 of their general numberof those who must hereafter and will be considered as their own-must have voted with the Whig party at the late election.

Such a third party," as a political fact, is, we repeat, no joke. It may be condemned, but it cannot be laughed at-it may be detested, but it can neither be despised nor disregarded. What shall be done with it? Why is it? Whence ?-above all, Whither?

The last is a question we begin now, for the first time, to look upon with some solicitude ;-slight, indeed; yet still not to be entirely silenced, even by the best reasonings or best hopes we can indulge in the matter. Not that it presents anything formidable, so long as reason and patriotism shall not have quite taken leave of the mind and heart of the American people; yet still involving elements, possibly susceptible of development into seeds of evil too fearful to be contemplated with any degree of calmness.

The present position of Abolitionism, as a political idea and a practical political power, is the result of a long series of mutual mistakes and mutual wrongs, on the part of both its own fanatic

friends and its little less fanatic foes. Good and bad, right and wrong, have been so confusedly mixed up in it and about it, that many minds, unquestionably of a high order, both in point of intelligence and integrity of purpose, have been led into the opposite extremes of opinion and corresponding action in regard to it. Each seeing only the right on his own side, and blind to all but the wrong on the other, have been led into these conflicting fanaticisms of mutual hate, which, unless arrested in their fast progressive tendency, threaten consequences incompatible with the permanent harmony, or even cohesion of our national system. This must no longer be. The danger, the evil, has already grown to a height which must awaken the alarm of all the considerate, the calm and the patriotic amongst us. It is time now that they should rescue the question from the hands of its antagonist zealots, and without further delay apply some effectual remedy, to arrest its continued agitation in the spirit and in the manner which have characterized its agitation for the past ten or dozen years.

The Abolitionists have made great mistakes; the Southern slave-holders have made great mistakes; the two political parties in the North have made great mistakes, in regard to it.

We have no reference to the merits of the general question of the Abolition of Slavery, pro or con. Abolition and Abolitionism are two wholly distinct things. Many persons, both at the North and at the South, look with favor upon the former, and earnest desire for its earliest practicable attainment, who nevertheless are foremost in their opposition to the latter. They stand opposed to the latter, indeed, for the very reason that they, dispassionately and calmly, favor the former. There is many a Southerner, who, as a Southerner, and if the question were left wholly to Southerners, would anxiously favor any and all feasible or likely modes of ridding themselves of Slavery; yet who, so long as the agitation of the question is kept up in the spirit which has characterized the movement, moral and political, of Abolitionism, will never cease to oppose to it the sternest, and even a highly resentful, resistance. Where it was their policy to conciliate by brotherly kindness, they have preferred to exasperate by the worst outrages of insult. Be

it borne in mind, that Abolitionism, not Abolition, is the subject of the present article.

Independently, then, of whatever of truth or error may reside in the fundamental doctrine from which they derive the name they have so much discredited,-truth as seen from the one point of view, error as from the other, the Abolitionists have throughout committed the fatal mistake of urging a purely moral cause by means, not only foreign to that character, but hostile to it, incompatible with it. Where they had to persuade, they have undertaken to force. Where love was the spirit in which they should have approached the task, they have done it in that of hate. Anti-Christ has been made the animating and presiding influence of a movement purporting a purely Christian character, and having no other possibility of attaining its professed object than by Christian means. We do not say this of all-far from it!-but the number has been neither small nor backward in activity and loudness among them, who have made it perfectly apparent to every disinterested observer, that it was much more the slaveholder, than slavery, that they had brought themselves to hate-much more themselves, with their own angry passions, their own one-idea'd partizanship, and inflamed bitterness of fanaticism, that they had come to love, than the slave who served at once for their text and their pretext. God will not be served in the livery of the Devil. The weapons that go on crusades, should be blessed before they start.

And now what good have they done? Have they made any advance toward the attainment of the object of giving liberty to the slave of the South? Is the political importance, as a balancing party, to which they have risen, or rather to which they have been raised, any such advance? Far indeed from it. They might go on, and if the same influences were unwisely continued which alone have ministered to their progressive strength, and they might first make the Union intolerable to live in, and then might effect an angry and hostile disruption of it. But meanwhile, as for any of that influence on the Southern mind-on either the reason of the slaveholder or his heart-from which alone can proceed any chance or means of effecting the professed object of their

fierce labors, every day of such contest tends only to remove farther and farther its attainment, if ever it may be attained. Without adopting all the extreme principles of the Peace Societies or of the Non-Resistance doctrine, yet of this truth at least every hour's experience in life affords fresh confirmation, namely, that the principle of Force is not only of the earth, earthy, but we are half tempted to say of the Devil, devilish. It is the principle of Evil and not of Good; and the less of it we call into service, in all matters of moral government or management of men, the better. It rarely fails to do absolutely and immediately more harm than good; and even in many of its applications where the present expedient good appears most to predominate, it is attended with so much incidental or eventual evil which might have been avoided by patient time or by the employment of the gentler arts of Christian love, that even that apparent good is far, far too dearly bought. Abolitionism has committed this fatal and suicidal error,—suicidal, we mean, to its true moral vitality. It had made mistakes bad enough and many enough before; it has made none worse than this last one, of converting itself into a political party, with a view to compel the legislation of the country into the channel of its own peculiar single idea, by means which in their ultimate analysis all resolve themselves down into this bad and false principle of physical Force.

The principal point we had in view in alluding to the participation of the two political parties of the North, in the general tissue of mistakes in which an unhappy fatality seems to have involved this subject, was this-namely, the popular persecution which at one period they both vied with each other in inflicting, upon its legitimate agitation and discussion at the North, for the purpose of conciliating the good-will of the South in our Presidential contests. Who has forgotten the time when each strove so earnestly to disclaim and to disprove for itself the character which each strove so earnestly to fasten upon other, that of being Abolitionist in spirit and tendency? Hence the rivalry of persecution directed, not merely against Abolitionism, but Abolitionists; not only in the bad enough form of newspaper violence and abuse, but the still worse one of popular violence; which mobbed the

preachers and lecturers, and burned the newspaper-offices and halls of discussion, of the obnoxious doctrine-doctrine to a certain degree, indeed, obnoxious in itself, but still more obnoxious from the danger supposed to exist that the whole Southern Presidential vote would go en masse against the party less forward than the other in this race of mutual disgrace. The persecutions of this character which attended the earlier years of Abolitionism at the North, gave it early a moral vigor and vitality which started it powerfully on the career of its destined "mission." This has served, from the outset, to attach to it the attractive character of a doctrine, pure, philanthropic and liberal in its professed aims, yet persecuted, seemingly, in the worst spirit, and by the worst means of intolerance, brutality and cruelty. These mob-persecutions were equally disgraceful in themselves, and injurious to the very object of their design. They nurtured the infancy of Abolitionism into a hardy energy of youth, to which every day was calculated to add increased force, progress, and boldness. It is the world-old story of persecution over again, which so rarely fails of defeating its own very purpose, whether it be directed against a nascent truth and good, or a nascent lie and evil. When, when will the human race learn this innumerably repeated lesson? Never, we fear, so long as the axiom remains, in private as in public affairs, that experience is but the stern-light of a ship, which illumines only its wake.

The South, too, shared fully in that very fanaticism on this subject against which it had itself so loudly declaimed. They may have had much to provoke, but not enough to justify, all they have done to justify, we mean, on the grounds of prudence and policy, independently of all others. We say nothing of their own local modes of action on the subject, both in respect to their legislation, and to all they have both talked and done in a thousand modes, public and private, in a spirit of retaliatory fierceness and violence, surpassing all that awakened it. Of all this we say nothing. It lies out of the path of our present discussion, and of the general range of topic heretofore observed, and still to be observed, in this Review, designed as it is for no sectional, but for broad national circulation

and objects. We will simply remark in passing, that no man is to be harshly judged in matters which he regards as involving the question whether to-morrow morning's sun may not rise upon the spectacle of his own throat cut from ear to ear, his infant's brains spattered on his door-post, and before his own hearth-stone his wife and daughter visited with a fate a thousand-fold worse than either. It is of the course pursued by the South in its Federal legislative action on the subject, that we speak-when we declare the conviction long universal elsewhere and frequent among themselves, that it has been the most injudicious they could have adopted. We allude particularly to the position assumed and maintained by them, in regard to the treatment of the class of Abolition petitions. Not that there has been in it any violation either of the Constitutional provision on the subject, or of any great principle of Liberty and Popular Rights. The "great principle" of the "right of petition," as it has been agitated of late years, is a "great humbug"-under a system of institu tions founded, as ours is, on the right of dictation residing in the people, and accompanied with unrestricted facilities for its exercise. The provision of the Constitution on the subject is satisfied when Congress abstains from passing any "law abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The action to be had by either House of Congress on any of these petitions when brought into its hall, is a matter of its own internal proceedure, to be regulated by itself in the modes it shall judge most effectual for the despatch of its proper functions and duties, and the promotion of the general public weal. If clear in the conviction that it has no power to act at all on any given subject-or even that it is highly inexpedient at the present time to act in any way upon it-it has a clear right to pass collectively upon a whole class of petitions asking for the action against which it has thus resolved, and to declare in advance, once for all, that it will not take any legislative action upon them,-that it will not allow its time to be taken up, or the tranquillity of its deliberations disturbed, perhaps its assemblage dissolved, by receiving and discussing the class of petitions in ques

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