The Press.
London, England, 1856-11-01 00:00:00

STATE OF AMERICA.

THERE is no great public question at the pre-
sent day which can at all compete with the
approaching American election in the prospec-
tive importance of its results. On the policy
and capacity of the new President will pro-
bably depend the maintenance of a great un-
divided republic on the other side of the
Atlantic; and on the maintenance or dissolu-
tion of this it will depend whether the in-
fluence of America upon Eastern politics shall
be increased indefinitely or dwindle away to
nothing. From two Americas Europe would
have nothing to fear.

The nature of the agitation now existing in
the United States can hardly, we think, admit

NOVEMBER 1, 1856.

of controversy. It is not so much the
violence of rival parties as the subject of their
quarrel which lead us to this opinion. In all
free countries the discussion of questions in
which the whole body of the people are in-
terested is sure to be attended by a degree
of heat which naturally seems to the
statesmen of despotic Governments the
forerunner of revolution. In America espe-
cially, where the fullest freedom of opinion
is as it were the differentia of their
constitution, much turbulence and disorder
may occur without justifying us in predicting
consequences of so much magnitude. But
slavery is, in the language of the Americans
themselves, " a peculiar institution " and one of
its historical peculiarities is this that all
empires in which it has existed have
found in its rapid growth the most fatal
impediment both to moral and material pro-
gress. We are necessarily compelled to take
our instances from times antecedent to Chris-
tianity. But it so happens that there is in
some respects a most remarkable resemblance
between the Italian provinces of the second
century before CHRIST, and the slave States of
America at the present day. We have all read
how the youthful TIBERIUS GRACCHUS was first
incited to the agitation of those measures
which modern scholars prove to have been
ise and even conservative, by the spectacle of
the vast solitudes which met his eye as he
journeyed through Etruria on his way to Spain.
The substitution of slave labour for free by the
Roman nobility, by depriving the poorer
classes of all means of saving money and
acquiring land for themselves had gradually
exterminated the old Italian yeomanry.
Slowly and surely a corresponding change
ensued in the composition of the Imperial
armies. The old patriotic feeling began
to decay, and though their consummate
military organisation enabled the Romans to
overcome the barbarian hordes of Gaul and
Asia, yet the youthful vigour which had first
made them masters of Italy and conquerors
of Carthage was no longer discernable. Nor is
the moral corruption in which the last years
of the republic were steeped wholly unassign-
able to the same cause. The provincial
middle class, usually admitted to be in all
countries the surest support of national
virtue, was destroyed. A freeman of the
lower orders was virtually excluded from a,gri.-
cultural employment; and in Italy there had
hitherto been but two modes of living—by the
sword or by the plough. When these re-
sources failed it was necessary to invent a third.
Rome accordingly was crowded by ht.rdes of
adventurers, whom necessity rendered unscru-
pulous, and who subsisted by the sale of their
votes, and the favour of some powerful patron,
whose bidding they were bound to perform
regardless of either means or end. Thus was
rendered possible the recurrence of such
scenes as have in modern times been usually
the product only of periods of recognised anar-
chy. A political opponent was mobbed and
murdered, or a great criminal screened from
justice, by the agency of these bands of ruf-
fians. Bribery was reduced to a regular sys-
tem, and its administration assumed the form
of a profession. The efforts of the wisest and
best of the citizens were unable to cope with
this monster evil. One after another perished
in the attempt, till liberty was finally trodden
under foot by Auciesztis, and Roman virtue be-
came a theme for schoolboys.
Exact historic parallels are rare. But few
will deny that the above description is in some
important features, if not a resemblance to
the condition of the Southern States, at least
near enough to be a warning. One great
source of the enmity felt towards them
by the Northcrns is the impossibility of
obtaining land there. They see some of the
most fertile provinces in the Union monopo-
lised by a few men, who might be equally rich
upon smaller estates were the ground culti-
vated by freemen. The slave° wners, on the
other hand, have come to regard the question
as one of vested rights, and being a united
body, generally speaking of higher education
and refinement than their opponents, it is not
likely they will ever submit to argument. Had
the question admitted of a calm and rational
solution, surely some of the many efforts in
that direction must have been at all events