I Still
Think That Such Line Will Ultimately Be Drawn, And That The Southern
States Will Be Allowed To Secede.
But if it be so, Virginia,
Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri will not be found among these
seceding States; and the line may not improbably be driven south of
North Carolina and Tennessee.
If this can be so, the object of the
war will, I think, hereafter be admitted to have been good.
Whatever may be the cost in money of joining the States which I have
named to a free-soil Northern people, instead of allowing them to be
buried in that dismal swamp which a confederacy of Southern slave
States will produce, that cost can hardly be too much. At the
present moment there exists in England a strong sympathy with the
South, produced partly by the unreasonable vituperation with which
the North treated our government at the beginning of the war, and by
the capture of Mason and Slidell; partly also by that feeling of
good-will which a looker on at a combat always has for the weaker
side. But, although this sympathy does undoubtedly exist, I do not
imagine that many Englishmen are of opinion that a confederacy of
Southern slave States will ever offer to the general civilization of
the world very many attractions. It cannot be thought that the
South will equal the North in riches, in energy, in education, or
general well-being. Such has not been our experience of any slave
country; such has not been our experience of any tropical country;
and such especially has not been our experience of the Southern
States of the North American Union.
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