Note 38 — Chapter XIV

Contemplate the still greater blunder of our civil war. It was forced upon the nation by the slave traders, that they might perpetuate slavery. And now after the infliction of woes which no finite imagination can gauge, these very slave-holders declare with one voice, that nothing would induce them to reinstate the execrable institution. How much misery would have been averted, and what a comparative paradise would our southern country now have been, if before, instead of after the war, the oppressed had been allowed to go free!