England is now playing her part in the fourth act of the drama of slavery. During the first act, for more than a century, she was actively engaged in the African slave-trade, and in forcing the victims, as slaves, upon the colonies, against their protest.
With the close of the first act came the American Revolution, when, in the truthful language of Mr. Jefferson, before quoted, England 'excited the slaves to rise in arms among us, and to purchase the liberty of which she had deprived them, by murdering the people on whom she had obtruded them.'
The third act, from 1834 to 1861, presented England engaged in fierce denunciations of American slavery. The British pulpit, press, and hustings, her universities, literature, courts, bar, statesmen, and orators, were all devoted to assaults on American slavery, and upon our Constitution, for tolerating the system, even for a moment. Her Parliament most graciously favored us with one of its own members, to denounce in the _North_, the slavery of the _South_, inflaming sectional passions and hatred, with the fixed purpose of dissolving the Union. As all the slaves whom England had sent to Boston, had been manumitted in 1780, and there was no slavery there, the object was, not to abolish slavery, or the mission would have been to the South, where the institution and the power over it existed, but the movement was made in the North, not to destroy slavery, but to dissolve the Union. England having failed to accomplish our overthrow in the two great wars of 1776 and 1812, she commenced the third war upon us, not from the mouths of her cannon, but in zealous efforts, continued now for more than a fourth of a century, to divide the Union, by the agitation of this question. We are indebted to England for the curse of slavery, and then for the slavery agitation. In this she has been but too successful North and South; but if slavery should perish in the conflict, she will mourn the result, because it removes our only dangerous element of discord.
And now the curtain has risen on the fourth act, and England, as always heretofore, is the chief actor. And where now is the great anti-slavery agitator? Why, England has reversed her position, and suddenly discovered the surpassing beauty and perfection of secession and slavery. Secession, an anarchical absurdity, destructive of all law, and all government, she kindly adopts as the true theory of our system. This heresy was discarded by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and all the illustrious founders of the Constitution. It was exposed, in all its deformity, by Jackson, Clay, and Webster, in 1833, when it was rejected by _every State_, except South-Carolina. But England repudiates the doctrine at home, and abroad also, except for our country. Substituting her wishes for the fact, she declares we are not a nation, and that any State has a legal and moral right to secede and dissolve the Union. Deplorable would have been the folly of such a system, and well then might England have exulted over the failure of republics. Nothing but her intense desire for this failure could have induced England to adopt this absurd doctrine. The whole world perceives the motive for so false a pretense, and history will expose and denounce it.