'The South' cares nothing for all these things. It 'loathes the very name of free schools,' despises industry and ingenuity, scorns the mechanic, and is altogether, as a community, behind us: as a merely agricultural and would-be merely military government, must essentially be. There are predicaments when the shrewd brute and cunning brigand has his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!' rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to endless shame and ruin.
It can never be. The man who believes in peaceable secession must be an idiot. Secession means a military nation living side by side with a non-military nation, which it hates and will do its best to crush. It means a successful rebel flashing the sword in our face at every fancied insult, and all the work of war perennially renewed. It means conservative traitors and doughface scoundrels stirring up riot and ruin among us at every corner, with no man to make them afraid; nourishing the South in our faces and intriguing to bring us into the Confederacy. It means the breaking up of the Union into many fragments—for who supposes that Southern hatred will not intrigue to this effect, and that the pro-slavery Northern men of the present day who have worked so hard to secure to the South the successful solution of the first part of its problem will not be found laboring heart and soul to aid their old masters?
Væ victis! If we do not rise in our might and crush this rebellion root and branch, we shall be crushed—and no honest, observant man can deny it. Fire and water may as well mingle as we two hope to inhabit the same continent. It is hammer or anvil with us now, and no escape. They realize with delight that our year of procrastination has been to them more than two years of preparation, and so confident are they of success as to even wish to conceal their numbers.
Reader, this is not an emergency whose evil results may fall on others and not on yourself. There is not one loyal American to whom Southern success does not portend misery, poverty, degradation. We have not yet felt the foot of the enemy on our soil, but if we pour away the life-blood of the nation little by little, why, a day will come when the blood will be exhausted, and the enemy, grown to fearful strength, will come ravaging over the border. Do not fold your hands in fancied security and say of that day: 'It is far off.' When it comes, you will say, as you now say of the past year, that there was time lost and sad negligence. A year ago we 'progressives' cried aloud in bitter earnestness for one great, overwhelming effort, for decisive measures, and after debating, and delaying, and plucking all the feathers from our bird, they threw him, half-starved, at Bull Run, and then cried: There is your victory! A year ago we urged expediency and boldness; but 'Democracy' quibbled at every thing, hindered everything, and then laid the fault on us—as its friend Jeff Davis does when accusing the Federal Government of waging barbarous warfare—so as to excuse his own iniquities. But now we have come to the bitter need, and the country must choose between bold measures and measureless disgrace.
Lo! the country is responding heart and soul. From every township comes the cry of Union or death! What was the waking of Sumter, compared to this of the summer and autumn of eighteen hundred and sixty-two? At last the truth has gone home—we must conquer. Conquer or be conquered, it is, O friends! but if you will it, you shall have victory. You have the strength: in God's name put forth your hand and grasp the golden crown.
TOM WINTERS' STORY.
I was taking an early walk on the morning after my arrival at the city of C——, in the spring of 186-, in order to sharpen my appetite for breakfast, when I observed a tall and stoutly-built man on the opposite sidewalk proceeding in the same direction with myself. There was something in his gait and his manner of swinging his right arm (he had a common market-basket on his left) that seemed not unfamiliar to me; and I hastened my pace to keep up with him while I observed him further. It was no easy matter; for he had a stride that, if hurried to its beat, would have put me to a run to save being distanced; but I succeeded in heading him off after a rapid walk of several squares, which brought us to the market-place, and I soon had the satisfaction of hearing his voice as he inquired the price of some of the marketing exposed for sale. This decided me, and I immediately threw myself in his way. He recognized me at once, and as he held out his huge hand, which I took in mine, we exclaimed simultaneously: 'How are you, Owen?' 'How are you, Tom?'
The greeting was something more than cordial. We had once been quite intimate, and it was seventeen years since we had met. I had lost sight of him that number of years before, and getting no satisfactory response to any inquiries I had from time to time made after him of mutual acquaintances, I had gradually dropped the subject, and never expected to meet him again.
Tom Winters was a Marylander by birth, and I had known him in Ohio during the Presidential canvass of 1844, when he had supported the gallant son of Kentucky, Henry Clay, with all the ardor of his generous, rash, and passionate nature; while I had supported James K. Polk, because—because he was nominated by the Democratic party.