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Show 104 TilE LIDERTY BEtL. BY RICIIARD UILDRETR· No one who has attentively considered the history of this nation for the last twenty years, and who has the power of looking beyond his own shadow, and taking a comprehensive view of tbo present tendency of things, can doubt, for n. moment,- unwelcome as the idea may be to politicians, theologians, lawyers, and money-making men ofbusiness,- that the question of Slaveholding, its toleration, its perpetuation, or, on the other hand, its speedy abolition, is to form henceforward in these United States, the great predominating issue, the topic of increasing and overwhelming interest, before which, until it be finally disposed TilE APPROAClllNG CRISIS. 105 of, all other hitherto engrossing controversies whether theological or political, shall sink mor~ and more into littleness and insignificance. Since there are between tho moral and physical world certain analogies which serve, if not to aid the reason to impress tho imagination, the change that impends, may not inaptly be compared to some of those which, in past times, tho earth itself has undergone. Disposed as the unobserving and unreflecting mass are to believe in tho unchanging firmness and solidity of the earth's surface, Geology assures us, that over the spots whore now rise tho rowering summits of the seemingly eternal Alps and Andes, tho deep ocean once rolled ; all these wide-spread inhabited continents of ours, having been lifted by some internal subOOrranean force from the dopths of the sea, which, thus displaced from its bed, must have overwhelmed with oblivious waters, other pre-existent continents, to all outward appearance, it is probable, no less stable than our own. The apparently solid surface of our globe, |
