of all that is most ambitious as well as of all that is most substantial in her community, are gathered upon the platform and crowded upon the floor of the largest Hall the city affords. The 'outraged' Senator becomes at once the hero of the North, his speech is multiplied by tens of thousands, and sows armed men wherever it is scattered.

But of all the symptoms we have seen of the present state of Northern feeling, none strikes us as more significant than the proceedings at a Sumner Meeting' held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cambridge, borrowing its name from English associations, is the chief University town of America. It is celebrated for the amiable and conservative tone of its society. In ordinary times nothing can be more composed than the public sentiment of this place. But a meeting was called there, on the 2nd June in this year, in reference to the assault upon Senator Sumner.' It was largely attended, and a report of the proceedings now lies before us, highly characteristic of the energetic and, we had almost said, fierce spirit which has been kindled by recent events in this scholar-like and serene community. We take, for instance, the speech of Mr. Richard Henry Dana (the wellknown author of Two Years before the Mast'), whose language is almost prophetic in sternness and solemnity. From a manly tribute to the virtues of his friend Mr. Sumner,--a manly expression of indignation at the outrage of which he had been made the victim, Mr. Dana rises to the issue of which that outrage is but a symptom, the issue fast forcing itself upon the people of the North.

'Mr. President, the last census has demonstrated what many have declared, but few have believed, that under the form of a republic, this country is now, and has long been, governed by an oligarchy. In the Free States there are now about seventeen millions of free inhabitants and no slaves. In the Slave States there are four millions of slaves, owned by three hundred and fifty thousand owners. These 350,000 * owners of slaves own the valuable land and the labourers, and monopolise the government of the Slave States. To make a long story short, there has never been a question between the slave power and the free power, on the floor of Congress, in which the slave power has not triumphed.

Is there force enough,' he continues, 'virtue enough, in our seventeen millions to assert their political equality, to achieve their own enfranchisement, to renovate the national policy, and retrieve

* We have elsewhere given our grounds for pronouncing this estimate to be beyond the truth. Mr. Dana simply quotes the figure popularly accepted.

the honour of the country, to make freedom national and slavery sectional, to make freedom the rule and slavery the exception, to secure the future for freedom? The Dutch revolution was as noble as our own. The Dutch began a civil and religious liberty, with heroism, freedom, industry, and prosperity. In time they came to make material prosperity their ruling motive. They ceased to live for ideas, and what are they now? Rich, prosperous, educated, respectable, useless, and despised! The glory is gone! What hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun. Is this to be the fate of Massachusetts, of New England?'

But most remarkable of all the speeches made at this meeting was that of the ex-Chief Justice of New Hampshire, and President of the Law School, who took the chair. New Hampshire is of all the Northern States the most conservative in spirit. She clings to the common law as she received it from England. She clings to the traditions of the early democracy. So steadfast has she been to her old gods that she has received the name of the Granite State.' And New Hampshire has sent from her borders no sounder lawyer, no more conservative politician, than Chief Justice Parker. When the spirit of New England was alive with the excitement of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, Chief Justice Parker, firmly believing that law to be constitutional, did not hesitate to lend it his support. Such a man, as he himself observes, can hardly be sus'pected of an immoderate desire for agitation.' Yet Chief Justice Parker made a speech at this meeting in Cambridge, which for earnestness and solemnity of denunciation has not been anywhere surpassed. We should be glad to quote the greater part of this address, which is at once a model of temperance in the utterance of righteous indignation, and a most pregnant sign of the times in America. But this our limits forbid, and we must content ourselves with setting before our readers the following most impressive words which this lawyer and judge, this grey-haired, grave, and conspicuous man, felt himself warranted, by the importance of the crisis, in addressing to his fellow-citizens, who know full well that whatever he may say, is said with deliberate and honest conviction:- If all measures 'that can be constitutionally taken to assert our constitutional 'freedom shall fail, what then? God in his infinite mercy 'avert such a catastrophe! But if a wise Providence should 'permit the madness and violence of a few to tear away 'from the Constitution the safeguards of freedom upheld by law, leaving only the forms of a free government in place "of the substance which we have fondly hoped was obtained, 'it is not for us now here to say what shall then be done. For

'myself personally, I am perhaps known to most of you as a 'peaceable citizen, reasonably conservative, devotedly attached to the Constitution, and much too far advanced in life for gasco'nade; but under present circumstances, I may be pardoned for 'saying that some of my father's blood was shed on Bunker Hill, 'at the commencement of our revolution, and that there is a little more of the same sort left, if it should prove necessary for the "beginning of another!'

Deeply indeed must the independent spirit of New England have been stirred, when such words can be wrung from such a man in such a place! The violence of the South, significant as it is, is much less significant than this slow, intenser wrath of the North.

One

We have said that the maintenance and duration of the American Union seem to us to be exposed to the greatest dangers, if there be not force enough in the North to command, and wisdom enough in the South to accept, a truly just and Republican policy for the direction of the Government. word more in explanation of this assertion, and we have done. Out of the actual crisis in American affairs there seem to us to be but three possible issues. Either the North must triumph, in no sectional sense, but in the interest of the whole nation, and the Republic be restored to the path in which it was originally designed to move, the South acquiescing in a policy which alone can save her, if any thing can, from the full consequences of the institutions she is seeking not only to cherish, but to extend.

Or the South must triumph in an entirely sectional sense, and completely divert the Republic from its original direction, the North acquiescing in a policy which will reduce her people to practical vassalage, and force them to lend the aid of their arts and arms to their Southern leaders, by converting the American Union into a military, oppressive, and intolerable oligarchy based on domestic slavery and foreign aggression.

Or the stern resistance of the North, encountering a violent and effectual resistance in the South, will lead to a disruption of the existing confederacy, and a contest of more than ordinary ferocity must eventually determine by its results the limits of their respective powers.

Weak in the numbers of their white population, weak in the degradation of their labouring millions, weak in the condition of all the branches of industry that make a nation strong, and strong only in the indifference of their Northern Confederate States to the fatal policy now fast ripening all its fruits of evil, the Southern people cannot surely be mad enough to invite

their own ruin. There was a time when some of their leaders were foolish enough to dream of an alliance with England as an alternative of hope for the slaveholding South. But that dream can only linger now in the brains of men too imbecile and too ignorant to command the attention of their fellowcitizens. The more clear-sighted advocates of the Southern 'Confederacy' have begun to talk of reliance upon Russia and Brazil! but before the stern reality of the Northern power these absurdities must be abandoned. The question appears to us at this time mainly to be, whether the North (including under that name all the States not cursed with the institution of slavery), has the energy, the virtue, and the wisdom to unite in setting bounds to this evil, and whether those States have leaders equal to the emergency? On this point the result of the Presidential election will furnish some further evidence; but even if Colonel Fremont is chosen, the struggle which threatens the Union with dissolution will only be begun.

The cloud which now hangs over the Union is not of yesterday. In the earliest times of the Republic it was seen rising, slowly but darkly, by gifted eyes. Jefferson saw it, and Madison, Jay, and Adams, and Randolph. Nay, we have it on the authority of Chief Justice Marshall, that Washington himself anticipated but a brief career for the Republic which his virtue had saved and founded. The tone of the celebrated 'Farewell Address' which was drawn up for him by the farsighted Alexander Hamilton is more sad than serene, and breathes more of warning than of hope.

The long-expected storm seems now about to burst. Need we repeat that, in common with all England, and indeed with all the friends of liberty, law, and order throughout the world, we do most earnestly hope that when the tempest shall have passed, the United States will be found greater, because more righteous, than ever; regenerated in their government and in the character of their people-a true Republic, worthy of the name, and equal to the obligations which it imposes?

No. CCXIII. will be published in January, 1857.