We differ from what are called the extremists of the South; but would not shoot down the sentinels of our camp. If not the wisest, most far-seeing and most prudent, they are the most zealous friends of the South. They believe, that eventually, the aggressions of Northern abolition will force disunion upon us, and look to disunion as probably the only ultimate redress for the wrongs inflicted on us. We think a victory may yet, perhaps, be won by the South, not by arms, but by Southern thought and European necessities. Thought, by means of the press and the mail, has now become almost omnipotent. It rules the world. Thought, with hunger and nakedness to prompt, stimulate, and direct it, will prove irresistable. That thought has commenced and begotten a counter-current in Europe, that impels France to renew the slave-trade under a new form, and induced a debate in the British parliament which evinces a universal change of opinion as to abolition and squints most obviously towards the renewal of the slave-trade. Revolutions of opinion do not go backwards, nor do they stand still in a half-way course. England sees, admits, and deplores the error of West India emancipation. This admission is but a step in a chain of argument, which must ultimately carry her further from abolition and bring her nearer to slavery. For a while, she will try to maintain some middle ground between emancipation and slavery and substitute coolies, and African apprentices, for negro slaves. But there are two reasons why she cannot long occupy this ground. First, its falsity and hypocrisy are too obvious; and secondly, coolies and apprentices do not answer the purpose of slaves. Her necessities will compel her to reinstate African slavery in its old and mildest form. Thus will Southern thought triumph, Southern morality be vindicated, and Southern wisdom, prudence, and foresight, be rendered apparent. The crusades lasted for a century. Those who conducted them had stronger convictions, and a clearer sense of duty, than modern abolitionists, for they laid down their lives by the million in the cause, whilst modern abolitionists, from Wilbeforce to Greely, have not evinced the slightest taste for martyrdom. All Europe then believed the crusades a righteous and holy undertaking. Abolition has never commanded such universal assent, nor such self-denying sacrifices. So far from marching a thousand or more miles to fight for their cause, they have not been willing to give up a cup of coffee, an ounce of sugar, or a pound of cotton, to speed it; no, they have been encouraging slavery, whilst abusing it, by consuming slave products. They should try the experiment, for should they succeed in abolishing it, they will have none of those products thereafter--Jamaica and Hayti prove this.

The crusades lasted for a century, and their signal failure opened men's eyes to the folly and wickedness of such expeditions; and soon men began to wonder at the infatuation of their crusading ancestry. So it will be with abolition. It has lasted nearly a hundred years. It has failed as signally as the crusades, and brought hunger and nakedness on its votaries, or at least on the laboring poor at their doors. As in the case of the crusades, abolition will soon be considered a mad infatuation--for want, brought on by it, combines with failure, to open men's eyes.

Southern thought must be a distinct thought--not a half thought, but a whole thought. Domestic slavery must be vindicated in the abstract, and in the general, as a normal, natural, and in general, necessitous element of civilized society, without regard to race or color.

This argument about races is an infidel procedure, and we had better give up the negroes than the Bible. It is a double assertion of the falsity of the Bible--first, as it maintains that mankind have not sprang from a common parentage; and, secondly, as it contends that it is morally wrong to enslave white men, who, the Bible informs us, were enslaved by the express command of God. But it is also utterly falsified by history. The little States of Greece, in their intestine wars, made slaves of their prisoners, and there was no complaint that they did not make good slaves; whilst the Macedonians, an inferior race, were proverbially unfit for slavery. The Georgians and Circassians, the most beautiful of the human family, make excellent slaves, whilst the Bedouin Arab and American Indian are as unfit for slavery as the Bengal tiger, or those tribes in Palestine whom God commanded Moses and Joshua to put to the sword without discrimination or mercy.

Again: to defend and justify mere negro slavery, and condemn other forms of slavery, is to give up expressly the whole cause of the South--for mulattoes, quadroons, and men with as white skins as any of us, may legally be, and in fact are, held in slavery in every State of the South. The abolitionists well know this, for almost the whole interest of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, arises from the fact, that a man and woman, with fair complexion, are held as slaves.

We are all in the habit of maintaining that our slaves are far better off than the common laborers of Europe, and that those laborers were infinitely better situated as feudal serfs or slaves than as freemen, or rather as slaves to capital. Now, we stultify ourselves if we maintain it would be wrong to remit them back to domestic slavery, which we always argue is much milder and protective than that slavery to capital, to which emancipation has subjected them. They have been wronged and injured by emancipation, would we not restore them to slavery? Or are we, too, to become Socialists, and coop them up in Greely's Free-Love phalansteries? There are no other alternative.

Again: every Southern man in defending slavery, habitually appeals to the almost universal usages of civilized man, and argues that slavery must be natural to man, and intended by Providence as the condition of the larger portion of the race, else it could not have been so universal. What a ridiculous and absurd figure does the defender of mere negro slavery cut, who uses this argument, when the abolitionist turns round on him and says--"why, you have just admitted that white slavery was wrong, and this universal usage which you speak of has been white, not black slavery. The latter is a very recent affair."

We must defend the principle of slavery as part of the constitution of man's nature. The defence of mere negro slavery, will, nay, has involved us in a thousand absurdities and contradictions. We must take high philosophical, biblical, and historical grounds, and soar beyond the little time and space around us to the earliest records of time, and the farthest verge of civilization. Let us quit the narrow boundaries of the rice, the sugar and the cotton field, and invite the abolitionists to accompany us in our flight to the tent of Abraham, to the fields of Judea, to the halls of David and of Solomon, to the palaces and the farms of Athens and of Rome, and to the castles of the grim Barons of medieval time. Let us point to their daily routine of domestic life. Then, not till then, may we triumphantly defend negro slavery. "You see slavery everywhere, and throughout all times: you see men subjected to it by express command or by permission of God, with skins as white and intellects as good as yours. Can it be wrong to enslave the poor negro, who needs a master more than any of these?" Less than this is inconsiderate assertion, not Southern thought; nay, not thought at all.

The temptation to confine the defence of slavery to mere negro slavery is very strong, for it is obvious that they require masters under all circumstances, whilst the whites need them only under peculiar circumstances, and those circumstances such as we can hardly realize the existence of in America. May the day never arrive when our lands shall be so closely monopolized, and our population become so dense, that the poor would find slavery a happy refuge from the oppression of capital.

In the South, there is another and a stronger reason for the feeling of indignation at the bare suggestion of white slavery--that is pride of caste. No man loves liberty and hates slavery so cordially as the Southerner. Liberty is with him a privilege, or distinction, belonging to all white men. Slavery a badge of disgrace attached to an inferior race. Accustomed from childhood to connect the idea of slavery with the negro, and of liberty with the white man, it shocks his sensibilities barely to mention white slavery. 'Tis vail to talk to him of the usages of mankind, for his prejudices and prepossessions were formed long before he heard of history, and they are too strong to be reasoned away.

This peculiarity of Southerners, and other slaveholders, is admirably described by Burke, who was the most philosophic and farseeing statesman of modern times. He says, "in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing then that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks among them as something more noble and liberal. I do not mean to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and those people of the Southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a more stubborn spirit attached to liberty, than those to the Northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestry; such, in our days, were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves who are not slaves themselves. In such a people, haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invisible."

Southern Thought Again.

When a public opinion is formed on a state of existing facts, and of anticipated results, and an entire change of facts and anticipations take place, public opinion itself must also change.

Fifty years ago all christendom believed that if the negroes were emancipated, they would become more moral, intelligent, and industrious. The experiment of emancipation has been tried in every form, and on the large as well as the small scale.

Whether in South America or the West Indies, in our Southern or Northern States, in Liberia or Sierra Leone, the free negro is an idler and a nuisance. Besides, his emancipation has so diminished Southern tropical products, that the poor laboring whites cannot afford to purchase the common necessaries of life. Moreover, to obviate this great evil, we see France and England reviving the slave-trade, under new forms, and Cuba actively engaged in it, under its old form, rendered far more cruel, however, by the abortive attempts to suppress it.

Now, we say, that, with the experience of the last fifty years, it is impossible for public opinion, in any part of christendom, to remain on the subject of negro slavery, what it was fifty years ago. Mistaken philanthropy has had full sway, and its entire failure must give rise to new doctrines on this subject.

These doctrines begin to be openly preached, and practiced on, too. The South leads opinion; she virtually proposes a renewal of the old slave trade. But the North and Europe are ahead of her in practice, for they are carrying on the trade, whilst she is only discussing its propriety. Yet, even in the British Parliament, regret is expressed for the great blunder of negro emancipation; and some speakers went on to palliate, if not to justify, the old slave-trade. One of them saying in debate, that only five per cent of the negroes died on the middle passage, whilst ten per cent of English troops sent to India perished on their way.

The latest accounts from Marautius show that she is flourishing. Because near two thousand Asiatic slaves, or coolies, have been introduced in to that single little colony within a few years past.

Abolitionism is dying out, because it is deprived of its old arguments and golden expectations, because it has done no good, and stands convicted before the world of infinite mischief.

The extreme pro-slavery men are the last to discover this state of facts; because a Northern sectional part is on the increase, they think abolition is increasing. But the origin and growth of that party has been all owing to the advance of pro-slavery doctrines at the South, and the consequent, seeming, aggressions of the South. At the time of the ordinance of 1789, the South seemed willing to give up all share in the territories. Under the Missouri Compromise she claimed more; and now she claims equal right in all the territories with the North, and she is successfully maintaining their claim. She leads public opinion everywhere, because she is in advance of that new counter-current of opinion, that has set in everywhere, about slavery. Soon the Democratic party will be in a majority again at the North. The South will take some other advance step on the subject of slavery, and then a new Northern party will be formed to resist Southern aggression. But nature is sure in the long run to conquer, and nature is on the side of the South. Negro slavery is as indispensable to the North as to us. They begin to see it, and to feel it, too. The introduction of more negroes, and the extension of slave territory, are new doctrines with us. Give the North a little time, and she will eagerly adopt them. We are her slave colonies, and she will command the commerce of the world. In the conduct of France and England about coolies and apprentices, we have a foretaste of what the North will do. Those nations need slave colonies, and if Northern fanatics are tired of union with the South, France or England will be ready to unite with us on favorable terms.

The world sadly needs works on the general subject of slavery--on slavery in the abstract--a history and philosophy of the institution.

Though it has been through all time the most common condition of mankind, little is to be found in the literature of the world about it, except a few pages of Aristotle and our own crude suggestions.

The attempts to defend negro slavery as exceptional, have been written with signal ability by the ablest men in the South. But it is vain to preach against the prejudices of mankind, especially where those prejudices have some foundation in truth. Negro slavery gave rise to abolition, (which never existed before,) because, in its inception, it was attended with much that was odious and cruel, and continues so to be attended in Cuba and Brazil. There, slaves are still worked to death, and it requires large annual importations to keep up the supply.

The strongest argument against slavery, and all the prejudice against it, arise from the too great inferiority of race, which begets cruel and negligent treatment in the masters, who naturally feel little sympathy for ignorant, brutal savages. Inferiority of race is quite as good an argument against negro slavery as in its favor.

We, of the South, have most successfully shown that, as the negro advances in civilization, the master becomes attached to him; and that, eventually, this attachment secures to him kind treatment and an abundant supply of the necessaries of life. But the whole history of the institution shows, that, in giving up slavery in the abstract, we take the weakest position of defence that we could possibly select. We admit it to be wrong, and then attempt to defend it in that peculiar form which has always been most odious to mankind.

We set out to write something of a rambling essay, and, indeed, the subject of Southern Thought is so large and suggestive, that it is difficult to write otherwise.

The first great Southern thought will be to refute the political economy of the "let alone" Free Trade School, and adopt some more social, protective, and humanitarian, in its stead. We make no war on politician economy in its large and extended sense, for we indulge in disquisitions ourselves on national and social wealth, and what will best promote social and national well-being; but only on that Adam Smith School, who encourage unlimited competition, beget a war of the wits, and propose to govern mankind by "letting them alone, and encouraging the strong, skillful, and rich, to oppress the weak and ignorant." The science of political economy, strictly understood, has but one principle, or at least one distinctive principle. This is variously expressed by the terms, "Pas trop gouverner," "Every man for himself," "Laissez-faire," "Demand will regulate supply," &c. It is this narrow and selfish philosophy which the South must refute; and, yet, which it is teaching in all its higher schools. It leads directly to the "No Government" doctrines of the abolitionists and socialists, and only involves slavery, in one common ruin, with all the other institutions of society.

Nothing is so directly adverse to slavery as a philosophy, which teaches that society succeeds best, when all are let alone to make their own way in the world. In truth, "Political Economy is the philosophy of universal liberty," and the outgrowth of that competitive society where the few wallow in luxury, and the unprotected masses, without masters to provide for them, are left to the grinding, unfeeling oppression of skill and capital, which starve them by the million. We must teach that slavery is necessary in all societies, as well to protect, as to govern the weak, poor, and ignorant. This is the opposite doctrine to that of the political economists

Again: We should show that slave society, which is a series of subordinations, is consistent with christian morality--for fathers, masters, husbands, wives, children, and slaves, not being equals, rivals, competitors, and antagonists, best promote each others selfish interests when they do most for those above or beneath them. Within the precincts of the family, including slaves, the golden rule is a practical and wise guide of conduct. But in free society, where selfishness, rivalry, and competition are necessary to success, and almost to existence, this rule cannot be adopted in practice. It would reverse the whole action of such society, and make men martyrs to their virtues.

Here we may pause awhile, and consider that new system of ethical philosophy and of moral duties which slavery naturally suggests and gives rise to. Outside the Bible, the christian world has now no moral philosophy, except that selfish system, which teaches that each individual most promotes the good of others, and of the whole of society, by a continuous struggle for his own selfish good, by making good bargains, and by giving as little of his own labor as possible for as much as he can obtain of other peoples.

The scale of moral merit is nicely graduated, and he is universally considered most meritorious, who works least and gets best paid. The difference between honesty and dishonesty being, that the latter takes short cuts, whilst the former gets greater advantages, appropriates more of other people's labor, by deliberately bleeding all with whom it deals a little, than dishonesty does by grabbing at too much at once.

Lawyers, merchants, artists, mechanics, and professional and skillful men, of all kinds, are considered more honorable and meritorious than common laborers, because they work but little, and exchange a little of their light labor for the results of a great deal of common labor. All merit, in free society, consists in getting the advantage in dealing: all demerit and disgrace, in laboring more for others than they labor for you. This system is called by the French philosophers "exploitation," which means taking honest advantages. In the general, no other moral rule of conduct is practicable in free society, because separation of interests and competition arm men against each other, and keep up a continual social war of the wits. It is true, the doctrines of the Bible are as extensively known as those of the political economists, and those doctrines touch and mollify the hearts of men, and neutralize in some degree the poison of the selfish system.

We, of the South, can build up an ethical code, founded on the morality of the Bible, because human interests with us do not generally clash, but coincide. Without the family circle it is true competition and clashing interests exist, but slavery leaves few without the family, and the little competition that is left is among the rich and skillful, and serves to keep society progressive. It is enough that slavery will relieve the common laborers of the evils of competition, and the exactions of skill and capital.

We have thus attempted to show that Southern thought must build up an entire new system of ethical philosophy. The South must also originate a new political science, whose leading and distinctive principle will be, "the world is too little governed." Where government restraint and control and protection are most needed, modern politicians propose to have, and in practice have, no government. They express a holy horror of sumptuary laws, of Roman censors, of Jewish and Catholic Priests, and of all interference with the family. Ignorant fathers must riot in unrestrained despotism. They have "a right divine to govern wrong," and maltreat wives and children as much as they please. Modern, so called liberty, robs three-fourths of mankind, wives and children, of all rights, and subjects them to the despotism of brutal and ignorant fathers and husbands. The most important part of government is that which superintends and controls the action of the family, for society is composed of families; and if the parts be rotten, the whole cannot be sound. Slavery secures intelligent rulers, interested in the well-being of its subjects, and they never permit the maltreatment by slaves of their wives and children. Every mail teems with accounts of wife murders at the North, and yet we have never heard or read of a negro murdering his wife at the South. Nothing but the strong arm and inquisitorial superintendence of a master, can restrain their wife murderers; they need "more of government."

Southern thought will teach that protection and slavery must go hand in hand, for we cannot efficiently protect those whose conduct we cannot control. (Hence, the powers and obligations of husbands and fathers.) We can never be sure that our charities will not be misapplied, unless we can control their expenditure.

It is the duty of society to protect all its members, and it can only do so by subjecting each to that degree of government constraint or slavery, which will best advance the good of each and of the whole. Thus, ambition, or the love of power, properly directed, becomes the noblest of virtues, because power alone can enable us to be safely benevolent to the weak, poor, or criminal.

To protect the weak, we must first enslave them, and this slavery must be either political and legal; or social; the latter, including the condition of wives, apprentices, inmates of poor houses, idiots, lunatics, children, sailors, soldiers, and domestic slaves. Those latter classes cannot be governed, and also protected by mere law, and require masters of some kind, whose will and discretion shall stand as a law to them, who shall be entitled to their labor, and bound to provide for them. This social organization begets harmony and good will, instead of competition, rivalry, and war of the wits.

Slavery educates, refines, and moralizes the masses by separating them from each other, and bringing them into continual intercourse with masters of superior minds, information, and morality. The laboring class of Europe, associating with nothing above them, learn nothing but crime and immorality from each other, and are well described by Mr. Charles Dickens as "a heaving mass of poverty, ignorance, and crime." Slavery is necessary as an educational institution, and is worth ten times all the common schools of the North. Such common schools teach only uncommonly bad morals, and prepare their inmates to graduate in the penitentiary, as the statistics of crime at the North abundantly prove.

There certainly is in the human heart, under all circumstances, a love for all mankind, and a yearning desire to equalize human conditions. We are all philanthropists by force of nature, for we are social beings, tied to each other by invisible chords of sympathy. Nature, which makes us members of limbs of the being society, and affects us pleasantly or painfully, as any of those members or limbs, however distant from us, are affected, would teach us how to promote the well being of each and all, if we would but attend to her lessons. The slaveholder feels quite as sensibly the vibrations of the nervous system of humanitarian sympathy which makes society one being, as the abolitionist, the socialist, or the christian. They are all in pursuit of one object--the good of the whole--feeling that the good of each is indissolubly connected with the good of all. By observing and studying the habitudes of the bees and the ants, of flocking birds and gregarious animals, we must become satisfied that our social habits and sympathetic feelings are involuntary, a part of our nature, and necessary to our healthful and natural existence. This induces us to reject the social contract of Locke, which presupposes a state in which each human being has a separate independent existence; and also the philosophy of Adam Smith, which grew out of Locke's theory, and goes still further by insisting that "every man for himself" is the true doctrine of government.

Now, the question arises, how are man's social wants and habitudes to be satisfied, after rejecting the philosophy which dissociates him? How is that equality of social happiness and enjoyment to be attained which we all involuntarily desire? Has not nature, which made us social and gregarious, taught us ere this our best governmental policy? Has man no instincts, no divine promptings and directions; or is he accursed to God, and been left to grope and blunder in the dark for six thousand years, whilst other social animals have understood the science and practice of government from the first?

We, of the South, assume that man has all along instinctively understood and practiced that social and political government best suited to his nature, and that domestic slavery is, in the general, a natural and necessary part of that government, and that its absence is owning to a decaying and diseased state of society, or to something exceptional in local circumstances as in desert, or mountainous, or new countries, where competition is no evil, because capital has no mastery over labor. But how does slavery equalize human conditions, whilst it vests with seemingly unlimited and despotic power a few, and subjects the many to all the ills or evils which that power may choose capriciously to inflict?

First: There is no such thing as despotic power in the moral world, for human beings act and re-act on each other, and affect each other's course of action, just as in the physical world all bodies, by the laws of gravitation, mutually attract and control each other's motions. The difference being, that in the moral world, the smaller and weaker bodies not only neutralize the despotism of the larger but often control and rule them. The wife, the infant, the slave, by virtue of that nervous, social sympathy, which connects us together, by means of domestic and family affection, which shield and protect the weaker members of the household, and by that singular influence which compassion and pity for the helpless and dependent exercises most especially over the conduct of the strong, the brave, and the powerful, are in the general far more efficiently shielded from tyranny and ill treatment than they could be by the interposition of any human laws and penalties. Within the family circle it is impossible to interpose usefully many such laws and penalties; hence, Providence has abundantly supplied those checks to power which man in vain attempts to fabricate. "I am thy slave, deprives me of the power of a master!" All acknowledge and admire the truth and beauty of this sentiment, and thus tacitly admit the correctness of our theory.

But another step in the argument is necessary. This only proves that the despotic power of the master, the husband, and the father is no engine of tyranny, but usually and naturally a tie of affection, and a means of support and protection. Yet, it does not prove that the condition of the inferiors is equally desirable with that of superiors.

The labors of life devolve on inferiors, its cares on superiors. Their obligations are mutual, and each in a broad sense equally slaves, for the superior is as much bound by law, natural feeling, self-interest, and custom, to take care of, govern, and provide for inferiors or dependents, as they to labor for him. Which is the happier condition, in general, none can determine.

Faith in God, which establishes and perpetuates the two conditions, should make us bow in humble submission to his will, and with reverential respect for his wisdom, benevolence, and justice, be ready to believe that in a naturally constituted society, high and low are equally happy....

But the free laborer has nightly care superadded to incessant daily toil, whilst his employer is exempted as well from the labor of life, as from most of its cares. The former is a slave, without the rights of a slave; the latter, a master, without the obligations of a master. What equality of condition can there be in free society?

Socially, slavery is quite as promotive of human happiness as it is morally and politically. "It is not good for man to be alone." His nature is social, and most of his happiness and enjoyment is reflected, and proceeds from his sympathy with the pleasure of others. Too small a family circle is injurious to happiness, as well because it circumscribes the pleasures of association, and prevents much interchange of ideas, as because it brings us nearer to that state of helplessness to which the solitary man is subjected. We cannot conceive of much pleasure or enjoyment in the life of a man and wife, with five or six infant children, living to themselves and cultivating their own lands. The sickness of either parent would render the situation of the whole family desperate. The healthy parent could not nurse the sick one, attend to the children, and to all domestic concerns, and also cultivate the land. The apprehension of this common event would suffice to mar enjoyment. But such a family, as we have described, would have scarcely any sources of social enjoyment at any time, for the constant drudgery of labor would confine them at home, and deprive them of the opportunity to acquire subjects for conversation, or ideas for interchange. Such a life is solitary and monotonous, begets cruel and despotic exercise of power on the part of the husband, who is not brought in contact with public opinion, negligence and slovenliness in the wife, and ignorance with the children. The boasted independence of such a life will not bear examination. The wife and six children are the slaves often of a cruel, capricious husband, who treats them badly, and provides for them insufficiently.