world-which sells prints in Manchester and steel in Sheffield; which challenges the industries of every country in Europe at its own doors; a power to which—it is well to remember-England is now as deferential as she was insolent in 1861.

The average view held by the educated Tory classes in Great Britain during the American Rebellion was fairly expressed ten years before by Thomas Carlyle in a letter written by him to Hon. Beverly Tucker, of Williamsburg, Virginia, in October, 1850, in the course of which the Scotchman said:

I find it a settled conviction among rational Englishmen, which they frequently express in a careless way, that the Southern States must ultimately feel driven to separate them. selves from the Northern; in which result there is not felt here to be anything treasonous or otherwise horrible.

But he closes his letter to Mr. Tucker with this word of warning:

I shall say only that the Negro Question will be left in peace when God Almighty's law about it is (with tolerable approximation) actually found out and practiced; and never till then.

1 The British Tories during the Rebellion, so far from seeing anything "treasonous or horrible" in the dissolu tion of the American Union, would have been pleased with such a consummation; and the attitude of Gladstone shows the feeling was not confined to the Tories. The English government did all it dared to help disunion. In the subsequent settlement with the United States, they paid somewhat roundly for this, though not adequately.

It may seen to the reader-and it may be true-that I have had more to say in these pages than was fitting or necessary about slavery. But, in extenuation, let it be considered that it was slavery which lay at the root of the agitations which divided this country for three-quarters of a century and culminated in the calamities that overwhelmed us in 1861. It was truly what Wesley called it, "the sum of all villainies." Out of it grew the inequalities and injustice which we in Western Virginia suffered for more than fifty years, and it was slavery which brought the proud old State down from its ancient grandeur to its later humiliation. In all the history of the republic, there has never been an issue which in morals or economic importance rose to the greatness of this. Even the struggle for independence did not involve such issues for weal or woe as lay in the later controversy that grew with the growth of the nation and cost a million lives and thousands of millions of treasure to compose.

CHAPTER XXVII.

SOUTHERN VIEWS OF THE MOVEMENT IN NORTHWESTERN VIRGINIA.

(From Pollard's Southern History.)

With an outrage of the plainest doctrines of the government and a practical denial not only of everything like the rights of the States but even of their territorial integrity, the Northwestern portion of Virginia, which had rebelled against its State government, was taken into the membership of the Federal Union as itself a State, with the absurd and childish addition of giving to the rebellious counties the name of "Virginia." A Convention of the disaffected Northwestern counties of Virginia had been held in Wheeling on the 13th of May and after a session of three days decided to call another Convention to meet on the 11th of June, subsequent to the vote of the State on the ordinance of secession. The Convention reorganized the counties as a member of the Federal Union, and F. W. Pierpont was elected Governor; W. T. Willey and the notorious John S. Carlile, both of whom had already signalized their treason to the State by their course in the Convention at Richmond, were sent as representatives of Virginia to the United States Senate, in which absurd capacity they were readily received.

Jefferson Davis, in his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," refers to the anti-secession movements in Northwestern Virginia from the same point of view as

Pollard. The June Convention was a "so-called convention," the Constitutional Convention was also "so-called," and it framed a "so-called constitution." The Legislature was also "so-called;" and "adopting the new Federal process of assumption, it assumed to be the Legislature of Virginia." We used to speak of Mr. Davis' own government as "so-called;" and we have this advantage of him in the matter of epithets, that while the Confederacy never got beyond the "so-called" stage, the governments framed in Northwestern Virginia endured. The reorganized Virginia government established by the June Convention at Wheeling is the government of Virginia to-day, with its capital at Richmond; and West Virginia promises to be a great Commonwealth ages after the "so-called" President of the "so-called" Confederacy has been forgotten.

After reciting the admission of West Virginia, Mr. Davis "pauses" for a moment "to consider these proceedings in the light of fundamental republican principles❞— of which principles Mr. Davis was himself so eminent an exemplar!

The State of Virginia was not a federation but a republic or nation. Its government was instituted with the consent of the governed, and its powers, therefore, were "just powers." When the State Convention at Richmond passed an ordinance of secession, which was subsequently ratified by 60,000 majority, it was as valid an act for the people of Virginia as was ever passed by a representative body. The legally expressed decision of the majority was the true voice of the State. When therefore disorderly persons in the Northwestern counties of the State assembled and declared the ordinance of secession to be "null and void," they rose up against the authority of the State. When they proposed to elect delegates to a convention to resist the act of the State and that Convention assembled and organized

and proceeded to action, an insurrection against the government of Virginia was begun. When the Convention next declared the State offices to be vacant and proceeded to fill them by the choice of Francis H. Peirpoint for Governor and other State officers, assuming itself to be the true State Convention of Virginia, it not only declared what notoriously did not exist but it committed an act of revolution. And when the so-called State officers elected by it entered upon their duties, they inaugurated a revolution. The subsequent organization of West Virginia and its separation from Virginia were acts of secession. Thus we have in these movements insurrection, revolution and secession.

The fatal defect in Mr. Davis' argument is that its first premise is false. The act of secession was not valid. It was an act of revolution pure and simple. If the ordinance had been legal as passed-which under the Constitution of the United States was impossible-it could not be consummated and in force until ratified by the people of Virginia more than a month after its passage. But the Convention and the Confederacy waited for no such ratification. By a coup d'etat as infamous as that of Louis Napoleon, the "so-called" President of the Confederacy took instant military possession of Virginia, under color of a league entered into with his fellow-conspirators at Richmond in violation of every principle of law and government. This league violated, first, the Constitution of the United States; it violated the act of Assembly calling and constituting the Convention, and the schedule accompanying the ordinance of secession; violated the Bill of Rights which forbade the erection of any foreign government in Virginia. It violated all the "fundamental republican principles" about which Mr. Davis became so solicitous after he found he was not to be hanged. This