The Favorite Pulley of Villain.
When a people or a party have determined upon a great crime, it is their invariable rule, as attested by all history, to charge upon those whom they mean to destroy some enormity which will justify their premeditated wickedness in the eyes of the world and make it appear righteous retribution.--The moral sense of mankind would not brook open and undisguised persecution and plunder, and therefore it has always been found necessary to have a plausible pretext, which will convert the intended villainy in the eyes of the world into a virtue.
The Jews, before they put to death the
Divine Founder of Christianity, raised an outcry against him of being a leader of sedition, and of endeavoring to overturn the
Government of Cœsar, although, in point of fact, nothing would have recommended him to them as much as the very offence with which they charged him before Pilate.
In like manner the ancient heathen sought to justify their persecution of the early Christians by accusing them of eating human flesh at their religious celebrations.
These are only a few out of innumerable examples which history affords of the policy of first giving a bad name to those you mean to destroy, and thus making men believe that their blackest of crimes is the greatest of virtues.
The present war is the latest Illustration of the principle to which we refer.
The
Yankees wanted our country for themselves, but they could not turn us out of our homes and seize our farms and property without some pretext.
They have therefore been holding us up for years to the execration of the world as a gang of bloody and brutal slaveholders — the greatest tyrants and oppressors on the face of the earth.
By the same process, and by continual aggressions, they have been forcing us into an attitude of resistance, and, when we have at last resisted, denounce us as rebels, and call upon the whole world to back them in exterminating the wicked oppressors of the poor negroes from the face of the earth.
In every detail of the war the same policy is manifested.
They charge some monstrous crime upon the
Confederates in order to justify the commission of a greater crime by themselves.
Their vile stories about the cruel treatment of the
Richmond prisoners are only intended to afford a justification of the most hideous oppression of our own prisoners in their hands.
Oh, wretches!
When will the justice of heaven descend upon your guilty heads?
