The Northern Pregremme.
A renegade Englishman, by the name of
Baker, is making himself conspicuous in the Senate of the United States, by his excessive zeal for the conquest of the
South.
In a late
speech, not as late as Sunday's battle, however, he says:
‘
"The President has asked us for $400,000,000; we propose to give him $500,000,000. He has asked us for 400,000 men; we propose to give him half a million.
I want sudden, bold, forward and determined war; and I do not think anybody can conduct a war of that kind as well as a Dictator.
I hope to be among the last of all men willing to lay down arms at all. I will never vote to do it till, without treaty, the flag of the
United States waves over every portion of its territory, and over a population either enthusiastically rallying beneath its shadow, or else abjectly subject to its away." ‘"We may have to reduce the
Southern States to the condition of territories, and send from
Massachusetts or
Illinois Germans to control them."’ We give these exquisite excerpts as specimens of the spirit and temper of the Rump.
’
This miserable adventurer,
Baker, is almost as implacable as his old master, George the Third, who was determined never to surrender his dominion in
America, but who found reason in the course of time to adopt a wiser resolution.
Yet, after all, what was gained by throwing off the yoke of a royal tyrant, if it is to be succeeded by the worse despotism of a vulgar military despotism?
Who would not rather be ruled by the gentleman George than by the loafer
Baker?
Thackeray once said that an English snob was the most irredeemable of all snobs, and it is equally true that an English radical is the most arbitrary of all despots.
No country in the world has a nobler class of gentlemen and patriots than the
English aristocracy.
But, Heaven deliver us from such specimens of vulgarity, audacity and arrogance as sometimes find their way to these shores, and of which this adventurer
Baker, who has crawled into the chamber once occupied by a
Webster, a
Clay and a
Calhoun, is a conspicuous example.
It is an extraordinary spectacle--one which might well make reflecting men in the
North shudder for the future — when they see a foreigner standing on the floor of the U. S. Senate proclaiming an imperial programme for the ‘"abject subjection"’ of their Southern States into territories and provinces — for a Dictator, and five hundred thousand men, backed by five hundred millions of dollars — and this programme supported by a vast standing army, consisting principally of a foreign people!
Is anything American left in the
United States?
The Constitution trampled under foot, a military despotism the acknowledged master of the country, and that despotism sustained by a foreign army!
In another portion of his speech,
Mr. Baker declares that, after the
South is conquered, ‘"you have no more need of a standing army.
Twenty thousand men are more than ample for all the military purposes of this Government in time of peace."’ It is scarcely necessary to say that the man who speaks thus is either a fool or a imposter.
If he does not know enough of American character to know that there is not a single State in the
Union, whether in the North or South, which could be held in subjection by such a peace establishment as he speaks of, he is unfit to enlighten a bar-room auditory, and if he does know better, he is willfully deluding the
Northern people to a state of things which will require a permanent standing army larger than that which
Lincoln has already in the field.
There is another view of the case which the
North may contemplate at its leisure, when returning reason gives it an opportunity to calculate the consequences of its present crusade against the
South.
It has established the maxim, by the popular sanction as well as by the vote of Congress, that ‘"the end justifies the means;"’ that the
President of the
United States may violate the
Constitution, and perjure his soul, as it is conceded
Lincoln has done in six separate and distinct particulars, he himself being the judge of whether the public interests demand a violation of the
Constitution or not. It has called into existence a gigantic standing army, composed of foreign mercenaries, with the avowed purpose of depriving all the States of every vestige of right that is recognized in the
Federal Constitution.
And it insanely expects that such precedents can be not, and never be followed to its own injury; that such inventions as these will never return to plague the inventor; that this vast standing army, with the return of peace, will dissolve like some colossal iceberg beneath, the rays of a Southern sun, and leave no trace upon the troubled waters.
What a grand delusion!
If the
South is conquered, constitutional liberty is dead in
America.
The very name of Republicanism will stink in the nostrils of all mankind.
The world will detest and anathematize as the basest, because the most hypocritical of all despotisms, the usurping dynasty in
Washington, which surpasses the worst tyranny of
Kings, yet has the disgusting effrontery to call itself a free Government.
The foreign mercenaries, upon whom it has relied to fight its battles, will feel their power and cause it to be respected.
Most of their.
Germans, upon whom it depends for the subjugation of the
South, are quite as much Red Republicans as Black Republicans, and the
North, which, seeing the probable danger to its property and rights from that source, set on foot the Know-Nothing crusade, will yet have reason to repent in dust and ashes that she has endowed a population which, even by the regular accretions of immigration, was becoming a formidable element, with weapons for the subjection of others, which may be easily turned to the subjugation of themselves.
