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Another John Brown Raid.
By this phrase the New York Day Book aptly characterizes the present LINCOLN foray into the South.
“The admirers of JOHN BROWN,” says the Day Book, “fairly chuckle with delight. The simple prospect of bloodshed [bringe?] out ‘double-leaded’ leaders, while we suppose that the first one of our Southern brethren who is made to bite the dust in defense of his home and his domestic institutions, will start the same bells with rapture that mournfully tolled the demise of the illustrious North Elba horse thief. Democrats! are you going to stand by and see these traitors inaugurate civil war? Hundreds and thousands are today starving in this city, or eking out a miserable existence, scantily doled out by the penurious hand of charity, simply because the vile party in power are seeking to revolutionize the government of Washington by degrading white men to a level with negroes! Are the inhabitants of this city lost to all the brave and chivalric spirit that distinguished their ancestors? Are there o [illegible] LAMBS now to rally the people to the defence of their liberties? Did the SCHUTLERS and the CLINTONS live in vain? We believe not. These Republicans will yet find out, if they really involve us in war, that they have awakened a long slumbering volcano, whose angry fires and uncontrollable lava will sweep them from existence more effectually and fearfully than the fires of brimstone and consumed the people of the plain, or the eruptions of Vesuvius [burted?] the doomed cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii.”
This has the ring of the true metal. The most efficient method of bringing the Republicans to their senses is to let them feel at their own doors those horrors of civil war which they are seeking to force upon others. For, not content with sectional war, it is a part of their artful and inhuman policy, to excite civil war in the bosom of each of the Border States, making the two parties in each cut each other’s throats, whilst they stand afar off and enjoy the fun. If the people of the Border States permit themselves to be duped into this horrible folly and unparalleled crime, the responsibility of their ruin will be purely their own. They are neither children nor idiots, that they can be led into such peril with their eyes open. We invoke the friends of Secession and its opponents, to know no enemies in Virginia but those who are enemies of Virginia, and to regard no Virginian as an enemy who is identified with her institutions and professes to be her friend.
