rankest kind of despotism should rise up from among a people the most boastful of their liberty that ever existed.  There are, unhappily, but too many instances of free nations that have behaved oppressively.  The first African slaves that were brought into the territory of the American nation came under the flag of a people who had most heroically struggled for their rights, and the recollection of whose efforts has been revived by the brilliant labors of the most accomplished of living American historians.  The Greeks, who had so much to say about their own liberty, believed that they had the right to enslave all other men; and the Romans, who sometimes talked as if they had a Fourth of July of their own, assumed that it was in the power of society to enslave any race whose services its members required.  The slaves of free peoples have generally fared worse than the slaves of men themselves despotically governed.  Thus there is nothing so very strange in the conduct of those Americans who, concerned for their “right” to trade in black humanity, and to live on the sweat of black humanity’s brows.  That which is strange in the condition of the world is the contrast which is furnished to the action of our Southern population by the action of the rulers of Russia.  Since American democrats have endeavored to show that no such contrast exists,—­that between the enslavement of black men and the granting of freedom to white men there is a close resemblance,—­and that the two proceedings are one in fact, how much soever they may differ in name; that it is not because he is an enemy of slavery, as it is here understood, that the Czar has become an emancipationist, but because he is hostile to the slavery of white men,—­that, were the Russian serfs as dark as American slaves, his heart would have remained as hard toward them as that of Pharaoh toward the Israelites when the plague-pressure was temporarily removed from his people,—­that he would as soon have thought of washing the Ethiopian white with his own imperial hands as of conferring freedom upon this race.  Such is the theory of those of our democrats who would still maintain their regard for the Czar and their worship of Czarism.  Alexander has not, they aver, been so bad as the Abolitionists have drawn him.  Like another illustrious personage, he is not half so black as he is painted.  Nay, he is not black at all.  He worships the white theory, and might run for the Montgomery Congress in South Carolina without any danger of being numbered among the victims of Lynch-law.  Other democrats are not so well disposed toward the Czar, their feelings respecting him having changed as completely as did those of certain earlier democrats in regard to Mr. O’Connell, when the great Irishman denounced slavery in America.  It is a sore subject with our pro-slavery people, this faithlessness of Russia to the cause of human oppression.  How they sympathized with her in the war with the Western powers, and prophesied