THE DEGENERACY OF THE United States.
THE following which we extract from a speech delivered in the U. S. Senate Feb. 29 1860 by the Hon. Wm. H. Seward, is a striking delineation of the character of this degeneracy, hypocritical and dragonic nation, and affords a good commentary on Rev. xiii, 11. Mr. President, did ever the annals of any government show a more rapid or more complete departure from the wisdom and virtue of its founders? Did ever the government of a great empire, founded on the rights of human labor, slide away so fast and so far, and moor itself so tenaciously on the basis of capital, and that capital invested in laboring men? Did ever a free representative legislature, invested with powers so great, and with the guardianship of rights so important, of trusts so sacred, of interests so precious, and of hopes at once so noble and so comprehensive surrender and renounce them all so unnecessarily, so unwisely, so fatally and so ingloriously? If it be true, as every instinct of our nature, and every precept of political experience teaches us that "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay,"
then where in Ireland, in Italy, in Poland, or in Hungary has any ruler prepared for a generous and confiding people disappointments, disasters and calamities equal to those which the government of the United States holds now suspended over so large a portion of the continent of North America? Citizens of the United States, in the spirit of this policy, subverted the free republic of Nicaragua, and opened it to slavery and the African slave-trade and held it in that condition waiting annexation to the United States until its sovereignty was restored by a combination of sister republics exposed to the same danger and apprehensive of similar subversion. Other citizens re-opened the foreign slave-trade in violation of our laws and treaties; and after a suspension of that shameful traffic for fifty years, savage Africans have been once more landed on our shores, and distributed unreclaimed and with impunity among our plantations. For this policy, so far as the government has sanctioned it, the democratic party avows itself responsible. Everywhere complaint against it is denounced, and its opponents proscribed. When Kansas was writhing under the wounds of incipient, servile war because of her resistance, the democratic press deridingly said, "let her bleed." Official integrity has been cause for rebuke and punishment, when it resisted frauds designed to promote the extension of slavery. Throughout the whole republic, there is not one known dissenter from that policy remaining in place if within reach of the executive arm. Nor over the face of the whole world is there to be found one representative of our country who is not an apologist for the extension of slavery. It is in America that these things have happened, in the nineteenth century, the era of the world's greatest progress, and while all nations but ourselves have been either abridging or altogether suppressing commerce in men; at the very moment when the Russian serf is emancipated, and the Georgian captive, the Nubian prisoner, and the Abyssinian savage, are lifted up to freedom by the successor of Mohammed. The world, prepossessed in our behalf by our early devotion to the rights of human nature, as no nation ever before engaged its respect and sympathies, asks, in wonder and amazement, what all this demoralization means?