Title:  The Contest in America

Author:  John Stuart Mill

Release Date:  February, 2004 [EBook #5123] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 5, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK, the contest in America ***

Redacted by Curtis A. Weyant curtis@pluckerbooks.com

Proofed by David A. Maddock dave@pluckerbooks.com

[Redactor’s note:  Italics are indicated by underscores surrounding the italicized text.]

The contest in America

By John Stuart Mill

Reprinted from Fraser’s Magazine

The Contest in America

The cloud which for the space of a month hung gloomily over the civilized world, black with far worse evils than those of simple war, has passed from over our heads without bursting.  The fear has not been realized, that the only two first-rate Powers who are also free nations would take to tearing each other in pieces, both the one and the other in a bad and odious cause.  For while, on the American side, the war would have been one of reckless persistency in wrong, on ours it would have been a war in alliance with, and, to practical purposes, in defence and propagation of, slavery.  We had, indeed, been wronged.  We had suffered an indignity, and something more than an indignity, which, not to have resented, would have been to invite a constant succession of insults and injuries from the same and from every other quarter.  We could have acted no otherwise than we have done:  yet it is impossible to think, without something like a shudder, from what we have escaped.  We, the emancipators of the slave—­who have wearied every Court and Government in Europe and America with our protests and remonstrances, until we goaded them into at least ostensibly coöperating with us to prevent the enslaving of the negro—­we, who for the last half century have spent annual sums, equal to the revenue of a small kingdom, in blockading the African coast, for a cause in which we not only had no interest, but which was contrary to our pecuniary interest, and which many believed would ruin, as many among us still, though erroneously, believe that it has ruined, our colonies,—­we should have lent a hand to setting up, in one of the most commanding positions of the world, a powerful republic, devoted not only to slavery, but to pro-slavery propagandism—­should have helped to give a place in the community of nations to a conspiracy of slave-owners, who have broken their connection with the American Federation on the sole ground, ostentatiously proclaimed, that they thought an attempt would be made to restrain, not slavery itself, but their purpose of spreading slavery wherever migration or force could carry it.