The Danger and the Remedy

The Danger and the Remedy.

Under the above caption, the New York Evening Post puts forth a long editorial. "The danger" to the Union is, especially on two points-the passage of the Nebraska Bill, and the Fugitive Slave Law. The "remedy" the Post proposes, is in the following words:

"The North has been wronged, or imagines itself wronged, and nothing will satisfy it but redress of the injury. Repeal the permission of slavery in the territories, abrogate the fugitive slave law, and we will engage that the Union should be saved. The people will applaud, and the pulpits will be quiet."

If the Post is not jesting, the naivete with which be announces his remedy, is really admirable. He seems to speak, as if it was a very easy and proper thing to be done. We wonder he did not propose it in the following form: "The danger to the Union is from the institution of slavery. Abolish slavery, and the Union will be saved." This would only be a different mode of expressing the same thing. The Post may be assured, that there is not a thinking man in the whole South, who would not deem an acquiescence of the South in his remedy, as equivalent to the abolition of slavery. There are Southern men, and perhaps Southern States, who would deem the abolition of slavery by the Congress of the United States, as no sufficient cause for a dissolution of the Union. There are ambitious or interested aspirants for the offices of the Federal Government, who will see no evil so great, as their exclusion from its power and place. But no selfishness can be so delusive, and no stupidity so intense, as not to recognize the doom of slavery in such a surrender. The Post, we presume, fully understands the extend of his remedy, for preserving the Union. He has been a consistent and able opponent of the institution of slavery. He desires its abolition; and all the steps he has proposed, and still mediates, on the part of the General Government, are aimed at its final overthrow. He has done all he can to quicken the hostility of the North against the South on this vital institution. He now supports a fusion of all parties at the North, into a grand sectional anti-slavery party, by which all the Free States will be arrayed against the Slave States. Let him succeed; and a sectional domination be established over the South on the principle of hostility to slavery-will the North stop at the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, or of the Nebraska Bill? Did they stop, after the repeal of the 21st rule? Did they stop, after excluding us from California!  There are sequences in the nature of things, in the moral as in the physical world, which follow by a law of necessity. Let those who oppose and hate the institution of slavery, obtain the power of abolishing it, after having previously broken through all the moral restraints which their faith and the Constitution have imposed, and is not emancipation certain-inevitable? The object for which the have labored for years, with a consistency and fixedness of purpose, worthy of the highest cause, is within their grasp. A sentiment which they have idolised into a religion, can be gorged in its greediest gratification. They are necessitated to go on, and slavery must fall.

A short time since, the cool impudence, or it may be, the reasonable expectation which induces the supposition that the Union can be preserved by such measures of aggression and insult, on the South, would never have been entertained. They show the low estimation into which we have fallen. The North has construed the course of conciliation and submission by the South to be the result of sheer weakness. We cannot or dare not act; and the Union with the South, is quite consistent with an Anti-Slavery predominance at Washington. Results are rapidly tending to prove whether the course of the South has been governed by a spirit of magnanimity or by weakness, by a romantic sentiment in favor of the Union, or by fear. The North may yet find when too late, that we are worthy of their highest antagonism and capable of the noblest efforts in vindication of our liberties and honor.