The 'White Slave' is, we need hardly say, depicted as the model of a Christian and gentleman; and yet the action on which the whole tale turns, and for which the author holds up his ideal creation to the reader's entire admiration, is that of luring his own half-sister into an incestuous marriage, by concealing the relationship—'unwilling,' to quote the book, 'to harass Cassy with what I esteemed unnecessary scruples.' Mr. Hildreth's object in planning this loathsome plot was of course to create an unproven impression of promiscuous concubinage between masters and slaves.
The fruits testify to the tree. England and all Europe are ringing with the anger, the imbecility, the inconstancy, the greed for empire, the bloodthirsty animosity of the Northern Government. We are every day confronted by fresh instances of its neglect for laws, municipal, constitutional, or international; its determined purpose to win its end, in the words of one of its most popular generals, Butler of Boston, 'by the light of their smoking and rebellious cities.' The Church may be, as we have often been told, and are willing to believe, the most important denomination among the Northern 'upper ten thousand,' the men and women of refinement, wealth, and social culture. But in the Northern States the upper ten thousand are the disfranchised class of the community; and the man who belongs to it, but is ambitious, must forswear his antecedents, if he looks for power.
If we turn to the States which own the sway of Jefferson Davis, those who are living at a distance, and who only appreciate matters across the Atlantic by the lights which the American columns of their favourite newspaper may shed, must have noticed a remarkable intellectual, if not moral phenomenon. Of old, Englishmen used to connect those trains of thought, which the better citizens of the States would designate as 'spreadeagle' and 'bunkum,' and we should term vulgar ostentation and overweening national vanity, with the whole United States. Possibly the rifle-bearing, bowie-knife-wearing Southerner was looked upon as the greatest offender. How is it, then, that the instant the blister has been taken off, the moment that the healing knife has completed the amputation, the South, so far as we can judge of it by its official publications, has apparently cast off bunkum and exaggeration, spreadeagle and mendacity? How comes it that it writes and speaks in accents which would sound natural from English legislators, but which we do not somehow connect with Pogram and Brick, Knickerbocker and Biglow? Every newspaper in England has had, willingly or unwillingly, to certify to the genuine ring of President Davis's Message compared with the spongy, illiterate, carping, and extravagant periods through which Mr. Lincoln
