His hand upon our throat.
--The voracious and modest
Bennett avers that
General McCielian has his hand upon the throat of the
South, and can choke us all to death whenever it suits his good pleasure.
His figure of speech describes accurately the temper and purpose of the
Lincoln Administration, which may be compared to a highwayman, seizing an innocent traveler by the throat with one hand, and with a loaded pistol in the other, bidding him deliver or die. This is precisely what the
North means by this war — nothing more, nothing less — deliver as your cotton, rice, tobacco, naval stores, and trade and commerce generally, or die. But the traveler in this case happens to be armed, and is in no humor to deliver up a dime upon compulsion.
If the highwayman can choke him to death when he pleases, he has been a long time in doing it. We were to have been crushed in April, according to the vicious
Herald. That paper declared that we should not be permitted to vote upon the Ordinance of Secession.
Then it was merciful enough to postpone our fate till the pleasant month of June, and gave us a still farther respite till the 20th of July, when our Congress was to meet, and which
Bennett declared old
Scott would disperse at the point of the bayonet.
Certain events on the 21st induced the
Herald to change its opinion, and it instantly became as vociferous in magnifying the military prowess of the Southern Confederacy as it had previously been in deriding and running it down.
It has now returned to its old game of brag and bluster, and audacity.
McClelian is throttling and choking us, but he is doing it so gently that the subject of it is not aware of the experiment.
Shut up in
Washington, blockaded in his own capital, and unable or unwilling to make a sortie in its defence, he has his hand upon our throat and is choking us to death ! If
Bennett's readers are capable of believing such nonsense, he would despise himself if he could give it credit.
