The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1861-07-02 00:00:00

NOM OF THE WEEK

Tlie war in America is an anomaly—the two
parties taking up arms for different purpose*.
The South, as all the world knows, desires to
maintain and perpetuate slavery. The North,
as is equally well known' takes up arms to
maintain and perpetuate the Union, and not
by any means to give freedom to the African
race. The Southern planters love their slaves,
and are kind to them so long as they are quiet,
just as an English farmer loves his cattle, or •
country gentleman his horses and his hounds.
The North neither loves nor hates them;
would neither keep them in bondage nor give
them their liberty; and, on the whole, considers
them and their cause a nuisance rather than
anything better. The North never has desired
the emancipation of the slaves; all that it has
desired is, that slavery may not be extended to
their own states. If the North desired the
freedom of the slave half as much as it desired
the maintenance of the Union, it would have
the prayers of every philanthropist in the
world for its success; but under existing .cir-
cumstances, how can we sympathies more with
the North than we do with the South Indeed,
do we not prefer the bold honesty of the South,
who calls • slave "a slave," to the hypocrisy of
the North, that professes to regard the African
race as the children, with them, of one common
parent, but who treats them as "contraband of
war," and talks of them as if they were saltpetre,
bombshells, and artillery horsed'? Since the
commencement of hostilities many of the most
adventurous of the slaves have made their way
from the Border States to the camp of the
Federaeista, whore they are gladly received—
notes "men," however, but as "chattels." They
are made to work in casting tip fortifications
for the Northern troops, they will be exposed to
the bombs and bullets of the Southern armies
equally with the Northern soldiers, and by and
by, should the North succeed in cementing the
Union, the escaped slaves who survive will be
returned to their former owners to be again
kept in bondage, the fugitive slave laws will be
re-enacted, and the captivity of the oppressed
race continued without their obtaining a single
particle of benefit. Is there then no hope for
the negro race? Only in one way—the triumph
of the South. A long, exasperating, and san-
guinary struggle, of which the end was the
complete overthrow of the Union, would put
the North upon its metal on the question of
slavery. An alien and hostile republic, or it
might be Kingdom of the South, with an
immense and not easily guarded frontier, could
not hope, after the passions excited by the war,
to negoctate successfully with the North a treaty 11
for the extradition of fugitive slaves. As Canada
now is to the oppressed nero, so would all the
North and Western States then become; and
the outraged "chattel," wishing to make and
declare, and prove himself • man, would not
have, as now, to travel a couple of thousand
miles,by an "underground railway," to accomplish
his purpose; but in some cases only to cross a
river. The laud of hope and liberty would be
brought nearer to him by all that vast area
between the Potomac and the Ohio, and the St.
Lawrence; and what is now difficult and
dangerous, would become facile and safe of
achievement.
The Kingdom of Italy has been formally
recognised by France, and two replies have been
made to that recognition. At Turin it is
accepted as "the fulfilment and the seal" of the
pledges given in l 89; at Rome it is denounced
as the violation of "the solemn promises made
at the beginning of the war." We cannot
undertake to divine the immediate reason of a
step so long foreseen and so unaccountably
delayed; but the official announcement of
France at the present juncture possesses an
influence beyond what might, perhaps, be other-
wise attached to it. Victor Emmanuel has had
more enemies to contend with, more conspiracies
to brave, than most new monarchs willed by
popular acclamation to fill the thrones of die-
carded rulers. He dispossessed not one but a
cluster of sovereigns, in every one of whom he
must naturally expect to find an enemy and a
conspirator. All these have their plotting
partisans scattered throughout every legitimist
court of Europe, and through every convent of
Italy, while in the centre of Victor Emmanuel's
kingdom is the privileged and protected
encampment and rendezvous of conspiracy.
Rome is the general refuge and safe lurking
place of all the enemies of Italy. There re-
actionaries and legitimists may plot in perfect
security and freedom; there Francis of Naples
may hire emissaries and enrol &swains. The
Papal territory is the shrine where even the
red-handed murderer is safe from justice—the
sanctuary of escaped offenders—the sheltering
place for conspiracy and outrage against "Unite
Italy." And the bands of these emissaries of
evil was strengthened, till the formal assent of
France was given, by a belief, that a rupture
still existed between the Emperor Napoleon and
King Victor Emmanuel It is now certain that
the Emperor Napoleon is no enemy to the unity
of Italy, and it is sincerely to be desired that
the conditions which he attaches to the
evacuation of Rome may be neither difficult nor
dishonourable in their accomplishment, and that
Italy may speedily awake to find her dream
true—unity and freedom from the Alps to the
Adriatic.
For years pest the French have been twitting
us with our morbid propensity for self-de-
struction; and that section of the Parisian
public who firmly believe that the English sell
their wives, eat raw beef-Makes, and amuse
themselves habitually with the combats of game-
cocks and bulldogs, are no less prone to place
implicit credence in the figment which assumes
that as soon as the fogs of November set in, the
inhabitants of Britain rush to ponds and rivers,
out their throats, or dash out their brains. But
suicide is, pethaps, far more frequent in France
than in England, and consequently Marshal
Marian has published an order of the day
=
suicide in the army. The cream of the
's allocution is in the advice he gives to
desponding soldiers to pour their woes into his
sympathising bosom. "Come and see me," he
writes, "I am always impassible ; come and tell
me your troubles; my soldier's heart will
understand yours, will recall you to a sentiment
of duty, and preserve your lives for your
families, for yourselves, and for the Emperor
who loves and trusts you." Only imagine a
fiercely bearded &wow, or a trim Z 0118•741 of