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Col. Forney’s paper, the Philadelphia Press, manifests some concern in view of the exasperation which has broken out at the South against Senator Douglas, since the Harpers’ Ferry outbreak. The heated and intemperate tone of the Southern press in that connection is deprecated, and a sensible plea is made against the idea of complicity in Brown’s invasion on the part of any political organization or sect at the North. But the fact that the South is no less maddened against Douglas than against Seward and Giddings, and with no less reason, is plainly palpable. The fact is that John Brown’s acts were a practical move in favor of Popular Sovereignty, and the Southern people so regard them. If Brown, as the Chicago Times alleges and as the Charlestown jury decide, contemplated a general slave insurrection, he was simply striking a blow for “my great principle” in Virginia- he was opening an avenue through which all the people might arrive at self government in the shortest possible time. The fact that Douglas invented his dogma for the purpose of extending slavery instead of setting the blacks with bowie knives at their masters’ throats, is what the South cannot or will not see. Our well-known contemporary of the Edwardsville (Ill.) Advertiser, (Mr. Joseph Gilllespie,) says that old Brown’s Constitution and Provisional Government, make a plain case of “unfriendly legislation!” It is not at all strange that the Richmond Enquirer should have taken the same view of it and should now be rending the air with anathemas against the person who devised the system.
