Both of these little books of Mr. Conway are devoted to showing the necessity for a proclamation of emancipation, as simple justice, as military policy, as mercy to the South, to put us right at home and abroad, to destroy at once the cause of the Republic’s shame and sorrow.  He combats various objections:  such as that a proclamation of that nature would send home instantly the pro-slavery officers and men who are now fighting merely to enhance their own importance or to restore the state of things before the war:  that a proclamation of emancipation, finding its way, as it surely would, to the heart of every slave, would breed insurrections and all the horrors of a servile war:  that such a document would not be worth the paper which it blotted, until the military power of the South was definitively broken:  that it would convert the Border States into active foes, and make them rush by natural proclivity into the bosom of Secession.  Mr. Conway disposes well of a great deal of trash which even good Republican papers, upon which we have hitherto relied, but can do so no longer, have vented under all these heads of objections.

He writes with such enthusiasm, and is so plainly a dear lover and worshipper of the justice which can alone exalt this nation, that we are carried clear over the wretched half-republicanism which has been trying all the year to say eminently sound and unexceptionable things, we forget the deceit and expediency whose leaded columns have been more formidable than those which rolled the tide of war back again to the Potomac.  Great is the animating power of faith, when faithfully brought home to the universal instinct for righteousness.  Mr. Conway was born and bred among slaveholders, knows them and their institution, knows the slave, and his moral condition, and his expectations:  so that these inspiriting prophecies of his are more than those of a lively and talented pamphleteer.

His earnest purpose in writing lifts us pretty well over some things in his style which seem to us discordant with his glorious theme.  He has a way, as good as the President’s, to whom much of his matter is addressed, of making his apologues and stories tell; they are apt, and give the reader the sensation of being clinched.  One feels like a nail when it catches the board.  But sometimes the transition to a grotesque allusion from a fine touch of fancy or from the inbred religiousness of the subject is abrupt.  Jean Paul may offer you, in his most glowing page, a quid of tobacco, if he pleases; the shock is picturesque, and sometimes lets in a deep analogy.  But the hour in which Mr. Conway writes, the height of faith from which his pen stoops to the mortal page, the unspeakable solemnity of the theme, which our volunteers are rudely striving to trace upon their country’s bosom with their blood, and our women are steeping in their tears, ought to drive all flippancy shuddering from the lines in which sarcasm itself should be measured and awful as the deaths which gird us round.