Note 14 — REFLECTIONS SUGGESTED BY THE CAREER OF THE LATE PREMIER.

We would not apply this strong language to all the advocates of the measure, but only to those who uphold it on principle as an enlightened and liberal one. If it is honestly put forward on low commercial grounds, not on high moral ones; if it is frankly confessed that it is an ignoble and selfish measure, in which our love of sugar and of revenue prevails over the love of our fellows; if we own that we have not virtue enough to resist these palpable and material temptations for the sake of the impalpable and invisible ones of right and humanity;—let it pass, (sorry though it be;)—our pious and enlightened nation is already disfigured with too many of these commercial blots, to make this further additional one matter of much especial censure. We can only lament that having made some beginning in the true and good line, we are so easily induced to give it up; that whereas before we could point to one brilliant exception as a source of light and hope, this is now to be extinguished, and we are to relapse into total darkness. But it is the advocacy of this measure on principle, as an eminently liberal and Christian one, as a triumph of truth, liberty, and reason, which is so peculiarly disgusting, and argues the corruption of the people. It is the sneer at every thing like true generous principle, the laugh at the high moral, the complacency in the low commercial, the assertion of the paramount importance of mere considerations of lucre over all the laws of humanity, that forms the bad feature in the case of these holy Liberals. When we find people, in a tone of profound piety, putting forth the purely commercial principle of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, as an inviolable law of the Great Parent of the Universe, the infringement of which, even to avert the deepest suffering from our fellows, is an impious rebellion against His will; when we are implored not to do evil, that good may come, (the evil being a want of sweetness in our tea, and the good, the preserving from slavery and degradation a large number of our race;) when we are exhorted to deal freely in slave produce, for the sake of promoting “peace and good-will among all mankind;” then, I say, that this servile liberality, this Evangelical cupidity, this Christianity of the ’Change, is beyond all expression detestable, and more worthy of the shafts of Voltaire’s satire than the Christianity of the Inquisition. The present measure will probably cause a greater amount of suffering in the course of a few years, than the Inquisition did during the whole period of its existence.