The Liberator

From the New York Independent.

A PLEA FOR SLAVERY IN THE LONDON TIMES.

Cotton Becoming King in Great Britain.

At length, the slaveocracy of this republic have gained a victory, in some respects, more remarkable than if Mr. Toombs' prediction had been fulfilled, of calling the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument. The crack of the slaveholder's whip is heard and feared across the Atlantic, in the British Cabinet, and in the editorial rooms of the London Times. Englishmen may have wondered heretofore, what the term dough-face, in such common use on this side of the water, might mean; they need wonder no longer; the genus has become a home production in England, and the exhibition of the species is as perfect as any that has ever challenged our admiration in the United States.

The London Times, with a most ignominious and unblushing avowal of debasement, indeed with an elaborate display of degradation, wholly superfluous, undertakes to make a jest of almost the only exercise of disinterested benevolence known in modern times.

It ridicules as a laughing-stock the idea of a great commercial people really setting themselves to redeem an unfortunate race from the savage cruelties of slavery, especially if such philanthropy cannot be continued without cost. It might have been begun in a fit of enthusiasm, but consistency does not require perseverance. What if we were once benevolent? Does that render it necessary to be so for ever?

The age of crusades for great and noble purposes is past, and men have long since ceased to dream of persevering in such purposes, if any sacrifice of self is requisite, or any powerful enemy is to be met, or any real hazard to be run, or expense encountered.

True indeed that, in the heyday of our philanthropic excitement for Africa, we undertook to put a stop to the slave-trade; but is everybody compelled, because he begins a good enterprise, to finish it? Are we to be held to our treaty of humanity, as though doing good to others were to be made really a serious business with us? Have we come to such a pitch of fanaticism? Because we do one good thing, does it commit us to the doing of another? Because we once thought slavery a great wrong and wickedness, must we, forsooth, be still required to maintain that opinion, and be held to its consequences? And even if we still hold those views in the abstract, does it follow that we are under any obligation to fulfill them in the concrete? Do people generally persevere in good purposes, or keep their promises of virtue and benevolence to the letter? Are there not many most respectable examples to the contrary? Does society at large, do individuals, do nations, always persevere to the last, in whatever they once felt to be matters of high merit, and even obligation?

DISCOVERY OF A JUMPING-OFF PLACE.

Had it not been put in type in the commanding Government newspaper, in the centre of the largest city and foremost Christian nation of the world--had it not been printed and sent round the globe, it would have defied belief, that, at the threat of the slave oligarchy in this country, such a humiliating argument and plea of release from an engagement to fulfill the common duties of humanity, could have been concocted and thrust before the public gaze.

We venture to assert that, from the time of Adam, there never was, among any civilized people, a more unblushing and profligate record and assumption before God of the question of Cain the murderer, Am I my brother's keeper? The argument that graces the columns of the Times in support of the negative of that question, rejecting the obligation of disinterested benevolence as an antiquated drollery, is a specimen of sophistry and scoffing, and a defence and avowal of national selfishness, that could not have been anticipated, except as a result of the extremest and most habitual moral degradation.

It is not difficult to answer the question of the Times.

No doubt both states and individuals can find company in whatever acts of infamy and folly they choose to perpetrate. And there are not wanting most villainous instances of that pitiful cowardice, and abandonment of a great principle, and treachery to a great promise, which the London Times calls upon the Government and people of England to imitate. Let us reiterate the noble apologetic interrogation, with which the London editor disclaims for the people of England any intention of exercising any extraordinary virtue, so long as there are so many respectable examples of failure and retreat:

Does society at large, do nations, do individuals, always persevere to the last in whatever they once felt to be matters of high merit, and even obligation?

Triumphant argument against the claims and instincts of piety and humanity! No, alas! they do not persevere; such virtue is outgrown, since the forms of an easy Christianity have been adopted, a state religion of expediency; baptized men and nations are not expected to persevere in such costly benevolence, if interest requires them to draw back.

It is unquestionably true that they apostatize; and therefore, if it be true that the London Times speaks for England, England begs the privilege of apostatizing likewise. She begs to be permitted to relinquish the Africans as the licensed and undefended prey of American pirates. She pleads permission to throw up her treaty for the defence of the weak and unprotected against the wicked and the strong, almost the only instance of an unselfish and virtuous treaty that adorns the records of national diplomacy; she begs to repudiate it as the lumber of an outworn age, as a whim of ideal life too expensive to be gratified, a piece of sentimental furniture, suitable perhaps, for mediaeval policy and piety, but not fashionable now, nor convenient, and very inconvenient as exposing her to the resentment of the great American Republic. She begs to be permitted, at the threats of a slaveholding government, to renounce this freak of philanthropy, and to do it quickly, that the wrath of the slaveocracy may be avoided.

ENGLAND BOWING TO A COTTON BALE.

If ever a humiliating spectacle under heaven was exhibited, it is that of England cowering at the feet of 300,000 slaveholders in America. The London Times is in a fever of terror and impatience. It would lend wings to the cowardice it proposes. The editor fears lest already the submission may be too late. The noble patriot, trembling for his country, asks, Will the Government wait? Will it do nothing? Will it not speedily go down upon its knees? Will it delay the abject act, till the slaveocracy go to war, blown into unexpected bravery by the windbags of the North? What is Government doing? It had better at once put an end to this quixotism of African philanthropy, and intimate to the American Government its readiness to take any proper steps for that object; abolish the treaty, renounce all right of interference in behalf of humanity, give up to the United States the undisputed supremacy of the seas, the right, unquestioned, to defend the piracy of all nations under the American flag, and allow the atrocities of slavery to sweep the world with uncontrolled dominion. Any relinquishment of principle, any sacrifice of benevolence, any disgrace, any apology, rather than hazard the resentment of American slaveocracy.

Will the people of England submit to be so insulted? Will they be lectured into such cowardice and shame? Will they permit the British Government to join hands with the slaveocracy of this country for the perpetuity of slavery, the renewal of the slave-trade, and the redemption of it from the shame, the abhorrence, the curse, the scorn, of Christianity, of common law, of international execration, of the Word of God, and of the universal human heart, that have so long branded it? They will, if they follow the example of the piety and politics of our own country. They will, if all they desire is to have the shame of such a course taken off, by the production of a sufficient number of respectable precedents.

And the argument now pressed by the London Times, for the clear abandonment of Africa, by the people of England, to the kidnapping dominion of the slaveocracy, is that of fear and profit. A powerful light of conviction is thus concentrated upon the national conscience, proving all their former philanthropy to have been a mistaken fanaticism, and duty a bugbear. Since the beginning of the world, there never was a more glaring and humiliating instance of the debauchery and corruption of a Christian conscience for the sake of gain. What has occurred to produce this mighty, this unexampled change in men's deepest grounded opinions in regard to a great moral subject? Has a new revelation come down to us from heaven? A few years ago, slavery and the slave-trade were becoming the subject of a curse ex imo pectore, in every man's mind, heart, reason, and moral sense. In the time of Clarkson and Wilberforce, God had caused the fountain of sin to be analyzed, and its condemnation pronounced, in a Court and Senate, the highest, noblest, most august in the world. The battle against the iniquity, domestic and foreign, was fought and won, twice over; with the eyes of all nations upon the conflict, and the spontaneous admiration of mankind for the act of Emancipation. The Church herself set the iniquity of slavery for reprobation in her standards, as one of the greatest of all crimes against God and man. The foremost Christian governments of earth execrated and forbade the slave-trade as piracy.

But now there is a clean and absolute reversal of all this virtue, this impulse and action of humanity and religion, and a galvanism of the buried iniquity into a frightful cataleptic life, and an enthronement of it as the supreme arbiter of policy and conscience.

The once mourning and frightened worshippers, at the blasting of their idol before the Ark of God, have taken up Dagon, and set him in his place again. The Church of Christ has swept away her strongest testimonials against the sin, and is making haste to obliterate every indication of a once enlightened and quickened regard to justice and mercy. Conservative ministers of the Gospel of mercy to mankind commend slavery as a sacred domestic and missionary institution, and declaim against the fanaticism that would call it sin; they race with each other to purge themselves of any suspicion of desiring its abolition, deprecating the being called abolitionists, as earnestly as they do the denouncing of slavery as a sin.

Deep answereth to deep at the noise of these water-spouts of human avarice and cruelty. The secret of the new outburst, now becoming national, in behalf of slavery, we shall let the people of the South explain in their own language, so far as the mystery need to be explained in reference to England. 'The people of England,' says one of the acknowledged organs of Southern opinion and principle, 'are at last convinced that the supply of cotton cannot be certain and uniform, unless produced by slave labor. It is in this view of the subject that the British Government, the British press, and the British people have ceased their denunciations of slavery and slave-grown cotton. They are beginning to think that slavery, after all, is not so bad an institution. The London Times has even gone so far as to denounce the policy of the British Government, for her expenditure of life and treasure in the suppression of the slave trade; boldly taking the ground that the British squadron on the coast of Africa should be withdrawn, and the object abandoned.'

An immense change has been effected in the opinions of the leading and influential classes of England, within the last few years, by the gigantic power of King Cotton.

They now fully comprehend the idea, and freely admit the fact, that if an adequate supply of cotton is to be had at all, it must come from the United States, and that the ratio of increased supply is dependent upon, and exactly limited by the future accession of slave labor to the cotton-growing States. The present state of the cotton-trade has convinced them that any fanatical intermeddling with domestic slavery would be not only unwise and impolitic, but that a successful invasion of the rights of slave-owners in the Southern States of the confederacy would react with fatal effect upon British commerce.

But are the people of England thus convinced, and ready to reverse their whole course of conviction and of action in regard to slavery, at the demand of King Cotton, and under the threats of the slaveocracy? or is it merely the Court preacher in the London Times, whose homilies the slave-power would gladly accept, as expressing the opinion of the nation? We shall soon see!

[Rev. George B. Cheever.]