Inter arma leges
silent_. This is felt in every social connection, even the closest
and strongest; for they all are, more or less, dependent on civil
law. But it must be felt particularly in that connection, which of
all others is the most forced and arbitrary--the connection between
master and slave. Liberty is a natural instinct. The caged bird is
not surer to fly through the parted wires than the slave, in his
ordinary condition, from the broken chain--_and the chain must be
broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes
away_. There are men who complain of the anti-slavery war policy of
the President. A policy that was anything else would not be a war
policy at all. The war upon the rebellious slaveholding people of
necessity involves an interruption of their laws; and unless the
advancing army should make good this absence of civil rule by
applying its own military power to keeping watch and ward over the
slaves, and thus abandon its proper military business, the result
is inevitable _that the institution must melt away as the war goes
on_. Abraham Lincoln might be as much attached to slavery as
Jefferson Davis himself, and yet no human sagacity would enable him
to fight Jefferson Davis honestly and effectually without mortal
injury to slavery.
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