Seward's letter,
in which he said that "if the safety of the Union required the
detention of the captured persons, it would be the right and duty of
this Government to detain them." I sincerely grieve to find this
sentence in the dispatch, for the exceptions to the general rules of
morality are not a subject to be lightly or unnecessarily tampered
with. The doctrine in itself is no other than that professed and
acted on by all governments--that self-preservation, in a State, as
in an individual, is a warrant for many things which at all other
times ought to be rigidly abstained from. At all events, no nation
which has ever passed "laws of exception," which ever supended the
Habeas Corpus Act or passed an Alien Bill in dread of a Chartist
insurrection, has a right to throw the first stone at Mr. Lincoln's
Government.}
Let us, then, without reference to these jars, or to the declamations
of newspaper writers on either side of the Atlantic, examine the
American question as it stood from the beginning; its origin, the
purpose of both the combatants, and its various possible or probable
issues.
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