Denton and Haughton Examiner, etc. — 1880-05-01 (Denton, Greater Manchester, England)

TELE LATE OONFLIOT.  CONSIDERABLE criticism was lately called forth by the speech of a military Member of Parliament, who, in a burst of after-dinner elo• quence, at a gathering of Volunteers, exclaimed All history shows that there is only one road to greatness, and that way is by being able to fight. No nation bas ever been a great nation unless other nations respect and fear it. However insignificant England may be upon the map, rho has a race of men able and ready to Fight any other race of men in the world and beat them. If anyone tries to persuade us that anything else in the world will make a nation great except its being prepared and ready to fight whenever ita honour is concerned, that unia's opinion is not worth baying. lass almost sorry I was not born at another time. Waterloo was fought when I was three years old, and there was no fighting in the world for th • next forty years of my life. Now people have again began to fight. lam grapheaded and too old, but d any for dares to land in England. you will see me at the head of my battalion. It is the fighting spirit of England which has made her, and if that fighting spirit leaves an, we shall go down and down for ever."' Now there is great truth in these remarks of the enthusiastic& soldier, though in directions very different from those contemplated by him in his speech It is, indeed, the fighting spirit of old England that has made her what she is. Her long conflicts with Paganism, with Ignorance, and Tyranny, with Superstition, with Slavery, and With evil assumptions of every kind at home and abroad, have, with the Divine blessing upon her struggles, raised her to her present height of greatness and ot moral influence amongst the nations of the world. Should she abandon these healthful energies of right combativeness, she would, indeed, go down and down to ruin, as other nations, in their moral cowardice and sloth, have done. For taample, there were the Southern States of the American Union before the Civil War. They abandoned themselves, with almost noes. ampled exclusiveness, to selfish greed and self. indulgence. Revelling in the perpetual summer of the Carolians and the Gulf shores, enjoying the luxurious ease of their pleasant mansions amid the richest crops of sugar-cane and cotton. with gangs of obsequious slaves toiling for them from morning till night, these proud Southerners lived in a realm of peace, but it was the peace of deatb; they did not exert themselves in any vigorous conflict, except to murder or to tar and feather an occasional " Abolitionist " visitor. Their lives alternated between their sunny estates and their holiday enjoyments in the hotels and bathrooms of Charleston and New Orleana. The great contests for civil and religious liberty, for missionary and evangelic.' extension, and for the varied forma of axial progress, were left by them to their Northern neighbours and to by nations. Even from art and science, from invention and design, these indolent Soutbrona withdrew themaelvea. Scarcely a book was written, or printed, amongst them: scarcely a painting or a sculpture was known as the product of • Southern studio, if, indeed, there ever was inch a place aa a studio in those States. Even the laboratories of the chemist and the observatory of the astronomer were, like the bold works of the engineer, almost unknown throtigheut those vast regions of the sanely South It was a realm of the moat sensual idleness and selfish p,,ee that the world has even seen. And aloof, was the consequence P Just as the still lagoons of Florida breed pestilential vapours, and just as the breathleas stillness of a sultry maimer gradually culminates in thunderstorms. so this false peace of the lazy slaveholder developed, slowly but surely, into the wildest outburst of fraticidal passion. And then was manifested the gigantic growth of obstinacy and folly which had silently been produced during those generations of ingloriona ease, which led on to the Civil War and to the vast , political tornado which overwhelmed that • generation of alaveholders in one common ruin. The history of other countries affords similar lessons of the mischief of is falae peace. and of a state of society which is noni.oombative with tte great evils of the world.