and South there is at this moment raging a controversy which goes as deep
as any controversy can into the elementary principles of human nature and
the sympathies and antipathies which in so many men supply the place of
reason and reflection. The North is for freedom, the South is for slavery.
The North is for freedom of discussion, the South represses freedom of
discussion with the tar-brush and the pine fagot. Yet the North and South
are both democracies--nay, possess almost exactly similar institutions,
with this enormous divergence in theory and practice. It is not democracy
that has made the North the advocate of freedom, or the South the advocate
of slavery. Democracy is a quality which appears on both sides, and may
therefore be rejected, as having no influence over the result. From the
sketch of the history of slavery which was furnished us by our
correspondent in New York last week, we learn that at the time of the
American Revolution slavery existed in every State in the Union except
Massachusetts; but we also learn that the great men who directed that
revolution--Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and
Hamilton--were unanimous in execrating the practice of slavery, and looked
forward to the time when it would cease to contaminate the soil of free
America. The abolition of the slave trade, which subsequently followed,
was regarded by its warmest advocates as not only beneficial in itself,
but as a long step towards the extinction of slavery altogether, it was
not foreseen that certain free and democratic communities would arise
which would apply themselves to the honourable office of breeding slaves,
to be consumed on the free and democratic plantations of the South, and of
thus replacing the African slave trade by an internal traffic in human
flesh, carried on under circumstances of almost equal atrocity through the
heart of a free and democratic nation. Democracy has verily a strong
digestion, and one not to be interfered with by trifles.

"But the most melancholy part of the matter is, that during the seventy