The story of Hayti is worth telling, apart from its bearing upon questions connected with the emancipation of slaves.  It is a striking record of the degradation of fine races and the elevation of inferior ones, and shows with what ease Nature can transfer her good points from her gifted children and unexpectedly endow with them her neglected ones,—­thus affording us a hint of something that is more permanent and irreversible than ethnological distinctions, by repeating within our own time her humane way with her old barbarians whose hair was long.  From them sprang the races which never could have dominated by cunning and force alone, and which have to lay down their dominion when they have exhausted everything but force and cunning.  It is a story of the desolation in which the avarice and wrath of man must always travel:  colonial prosperity was nothing but a howling war-path blazed directly across stately and beautiful human nature.  It shows the blood which the fine hands of luxury never could wash off; the terrible secret at last betrayed itself.  In telling this story, the horrors of San Domingo are accounted for, and whatever was exceptional in the circumstances is at the same time marked, to prevent them from being applied without discrimination to the present condition of America.  But the story must be told from the beginning, for its own sake; otherwise it will be a bad story, without a moral.  If the main features of it are carefully preserved, it will make its own application.

That, however, is fatal to any attempt to infect minds with the Haytian bug-bear, now that political discussion threatens to ravage the country which our arms are saving.  It has been used before, when it was necessary to save the Union and to render anti-slavery sentiment odious.  The weak and designing, and all who wait for the war to achieve a constitutional recurrence of our national malady, will use it again to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity.

Slavery is a continual conspiracy.  Its life depends upon intrigue, aggression, adroit combinations with other forms of human selfishness.  The people at the North who at this moment hate to hear the word Emancipation mentioned, and who insist that the war shall merely restore things to their original position, are the people who always hated the phrase “Anti-Slavery,” who will be ready to form a fresh coalition with Slavery for the sake of recovering or creating political advantages, and whom the South will know how to use again, by reviving ancient prejudices, and making its very wounds a cause for sympathy.  Slavery will be the nucleus of political combinations so long as it can preserve its constitutional and commercial advantages,—­while it can sell its cotton and recover its fugitives.  Is the precious blood already spilled in this war to become, as it congeals, nothing but cement to fugitive-slave bills, and the basis of three-fifths, and the internal