utterly subversive of all civil government. Whatever may be their faults, they have certainly shown themselves most acute logicians. There is some moral merit in consistency of reasoning, and the men who are jealous of such consistency, are not utterly and irremediably depraved. Their great cry is moral power, and they therefore most consistently eschew all political action. The others, too, are often inclined to mount this old hobby, yet as though struck with the horrid repug. nance between any true ideas of moral power and some of the abominable principles which they openly profess, they have of late years been more especially known as the advocates of political action. Occasionally they would exhibit their moral power in assailling such men as Mr. Frelinghuysen, as in that canting letter of Jay just before the last election; but the thought of Sabbaths prostituted to the lowest political purposes, their incessant abuse of some of the purest men in our land, and their strange doctrine respecting an appeal to Heaven, closes their mouths and prevents their saying much on this once trite and favorite topic. The Boston section have several times gone through the ridiculous farce of dissolving the Union by resolution. The others profess to adhere to the Constitution, and claim, in this respect a superiority to their more fanatical brethren on the score of attachment to law and order and existing institutions. No pretence, however, could be more unfounded. They have been stigmatized by the Garrison abolitionists as the most unprincipled and dangerous party in the country; and a careful examination of their proceedings for the last few years must produce a conviction that these witnesses from their own ranks, are true. The followers of Garrison and Abby Kelly disclaim all regard for the union, and by so doing have rendered themselves harmless. They declare that the house is infected, and therefore, like consistent lunatics, profess to have left the premises. The adherents of Birney, Smith, and Stewart remain in the building, but only for the purpose of setting it on fire.

To drop the figure, the latter are unceasing in their attacks upon certain provisions, which every man, who prizes in the least a reputation for candor, must admit to be prominent parts of our national Constitution. Some of these they endeavor to explain away by a sophistry which would annihilate all distinction of

the legal and illegal, of the right and the wrong, of the true and the false. Interpretations are forced upon other parts, such as never entered into the conceptions of any brain before they were broached by Alvan Stewart. Yet still, with all their efforts, some clauses remain too stubborn to yield to any strain of their sophistical machinery. In spite of every torturing effort, the Constitution is confessed, even by them, to contain a provision for the arrest and return of fugitive slaves. Now, these men of conscience have formed associations for doing acts in direct violation of this provision. Their eastern brethren released by their political position of alienation from the union, can pursue in comparative freedom those annual logomachies with which at each returning anniversary they amuse the public. They can evaporate their moral power, and let off their moral steam, in railing at the Clergy, the Church, and the State. The other section have more serious work to perform. They are to contrive ways and means to reconcile intended perjury to their most squeamish and delicate consciences. As private individuals they might get along with a tolerable degree of consistency, yielding support to the laws when deemed right, and quietly keeping aloof, or interposing only a negative resistance, when they seemed to demand a violation of conscience. They may abstain from holding office. But others of them have more ambition. Their main object being to thwart that one of the two great political parties which is the most nothern in its influence and its measures, they too must set a-going a political organization. Hence they must have candidates; and hence too the very serious question must arise, how these candidates can conscientiously swear to maintain and execute the laws and constitution of the United States when they are not only warmly opposed to some of its provisions as morally wrong, but have actually been engaged, and intend for the future to be engaged, in efforts for their direct violation.

The Garrison section, whose advance position enables them to see clearly the whole ground, charge them with inconsistency. To every unsophisticated conscience it presents all the features of intended perjury. They themselves feel the pressure-Conscience though blinded by sophistry is not utterly palsied, and hence the late effort of James G. Birney, the individual most deeply involved in

ed that the doing of the act, although included in the original intention, will involve a violation of previous or higher moral obligation-such view, through negligence or ignorance, not having presented itself to the mind, when the oath was taken.

Now, in all these cases, most ethical writers regard a man as absolved from his oath. There may be some doubt, in regard to the second, where there is supposed to be only a mistake of facts, the knowledge of which might have prevented the original taking, but which would require no breach of moral obligation in the performance. A true and rigid morality would seem to require it, as the safe rule, that, in such case, performance should not be excused, on the plea of ignorance, even although such ignorance arose from the designed misrepresentation of the imposer. The principle might be different in regard to contracts unsworn; but the solemnity of the oath, by which the Deity is made a party, would seem to give rise to a higher view of its binding power. It is on this ground, that the Scriptures commend the man, who “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not." In all such cases, too, in which the party would be regarded as absolved, the guilt, if any, would be viewed as attaching to the taking of the oath, and not to its non-performance.

Varying somewhat, from any of the above, but running parallel to them all, may be supposed to be the case of interpretation-in which the taker differs from the imposer, or from the opinions of others interested in the performance, and there is no common arbiter, submission to whose decree, (as is the fact, in regard to our Constitution,) enters into the implied substance of the oath itself.

The case of Mr. Birney and his followers, however, presents features widely diverse from every one of these. There is no plea of impossibility of performance. There can be no allegation of any mistake, as to facts subsequently discovered. It is not the condition of a man, who, in a state of ignorance or stupidity, swears to do what he afterwards discovers to be wrong. Mr. Birney prides himsclf in having a conscience always wide awake. It is not a question of interpretation, when one professes, at least, to be willing to observe the whole instrument, although party madness, or other causes, may have strongly biassed him to a false cnstruction. This chapter of po

litical ethics has indeed, presented some most strange and almost inexplicable phenomena. There have been those rigid constructionists, who have strained most piteously at the smallest harborbill for the improvement of navigation between the States, and yet have professed themselves able and willing to swallow all Mexico. There have been inexplicable State Rights men, who know of no power in the Constitution, to require an election of Members of Congress by districts, and yet find ample authority to vary the very foundations of the original Federal Compact-and, by the summary process of joint resolution, to receive a foreign people, to join hereafter in the same stale cry of strict construction, whenever such a course shall tend to throw farther restrictions upon the prosperity of the earlier members of the confederacy. There have been other still more unaccountable exhibitions of the human intellect and the human conscience, in men who regard the distribution of the annual proceeds of the public lands among our own impoverished states, as one of the most glaring and dangerous breaches of the Constitution, whilst at the same time they find the most undoubted power to pay the unknown millions of the debt of Texas. These cases we say are inexplicable, or only to be resolved on the ground of some strange obliquity which party madness generates in the human conscience, yet still even the men who act in this unaccountable manner, do, in profession at least, declare their adherence to the whole Constitution, and its provisions as they understand them.

Mr. Birney takes shelter under no such plea of honest difference of interpretation. He boldly avows his willingness to take an unqualified oath to support and execute a Constitution and laws containing provisions which he does not intend to execute. Such provision being, at the time, well known to him, their true meaning undisputed by him, and the guilt which they involve (if there be any such guilt,) as clearly presented to his conscience when he positively swears to their observance, as it can be at any subsequent period. No reservation being made, or allowed, it is the same as though he should promise to perform each act separately and specifically or as though it were thus administered:

"I, James Birney do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God, that as

President of these United States, I will fully and faithfully cause to be executed, according to their true intent and meaning, those clauses in the Constitution, and all laws made in pursuance thereof, which require the arrest and return of fugitive slaves, and also that I will at any time, when circumstances require it, call out the military force of these United States and employ it for the suppression of any attempt, made by the slaves of any of the States, to rise against their masters and recover their liberty by force."

Here is a case, reader, which you will find in none of the books, simply because no writer on oaths or moral obligation, ever supposed it could possibly arise. Says Mr. Birney, there are certain parts of the Constitution and laws which I regard as regugnant to my sense of justice, and which I should not therefore execute. Then why not, replies Mr. Shapter the conscientious abolitionist of the other school to whom the letter was directed then, why not take the oath with a qualification, why swear to perform without exception when you mean to do no such thing? 'But,' says our man with the tender conscience, the oath cannot be taken in that form; the chief justice would not thus administer it to me, and neither the laws, nor propriety, nor common sense, would allow him to make any reservation in regard to any part, any more than in respect to the whole of the instrument. I therefore take it as imposed, and if you wish to know how far I mean to perform, you have all the evidence that you can desire in the exquisite sense of moral obligation I exhibit in the transaction.' The amount of it all is this-Here we have a man whose most sensitive conscience feels that it would be wrong to do certain acts, but finds no difficulty in allowing him to swear that he will do them, without qualification or

reserve.

This charge against Mr. Birney has pressed so hard, that the Emancipator, for the last two numbers, has been specially devoted to his defence. Some of the positions advanced by the Reverend Editor are so very remarkable, that we must devote a short space to their consideration. One ground assumed is, that the Constitution being intended to promote justice, slaveholders and pro-slavery men do themselves commit perjury in swearing to support that instrument, whilst they maintan the system of slavery, and there

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fore, according to this most conscientious divine, abolitionists have a right to commit a little perjury as long as their opponents are guilty of a great deal more. We give his own strange language: "A man, (says the Rev. Joshua Leavitt,) cannot be just and unjust at the same time even if he does swear it." This is said on the ground that the Constitution contradicts itself, in professing to promote justice and yet maintaining slavery. Therefore," he proceeds, " a man cannot support it at all on such a construction. If he swears to do so, (that is to support it as it is) he violates the main drift (to promote justice) and by the simple rule of three, he is guilty of more perjury than if he had obeyed the main drift and violated the pro-slavery provisions." The drift of this is most obvious. Here is an answer to a most grave and serious charge, and the whole justification is made a question in the rule of three, as to the proportion of perjury, and an attempt to show that somebody else is guilty of it in a still higher degree. If such be the predicament in which the instrument places a man, says the disenthralled abolitionist of the other school-why have anything to do with it?-why swear to it at all? Because, says Mr. Leavitt, we shall not commit half as much perjury on our construction, as will lie upon the consciences of those who adopt the pro-slavery view.

Another argument of this reverend casuist is, that "if the country allows them (the liberty men) to hold office, then it consents that they shall act out in office their own view of the Constitution, and cannot very reasonably accuse them of perjury."-That is, the guilt of the perjury will rest upon those, who by supporting them, placed them in such predicament, where they are necessitated to swear to what they do not intend to perform. We hope that all who hereafter may be called upon to vote for Mr. Birney, will remember under what a load of responsibility the argument of the reverend gentlemen places them, and that they will be very careful how they lead these stern moralists into such a perilous temptation. Besides, in what a light does such reasoning present a professed minister of the gospel? Here the question of the guilt of perjury is made to turn on the naked fact of a majority or minority of votes, without any more allusion to the eternal principles of the oath, or to the God of the oath, than though the declaration had proceeded from a professed atheist.

In the succeeding number of the Emancipator, the editor grows still more bold. Mr. Shapter had spoken of a qualification. "This," says Mr. Leavitt, "is certainly a curious view of the matter." "Mr. Birney," he proceeds, "has made the qualification in the most public mannerbefore God, his constituents, and the nation. But Mr. Shapter is not content with this. He would have Mr. Birney say, when the oath is administered, that he has a qualification to make, and thus beat out his brains against a mere technicality, for the benefit of slavery." "All this because the slaveholders have had the cunning to foist into our solemn, oath-bound Constitution of government, a tacit agreement that their piracy shall be protected! Do they take us to be superstitious idolators, who will not overstep a priest's tabu to save the lives of our own mother's children? Such people would count all the letters of the Bible, and attach inspiration to its bad grammar. Their souls groan under the bondage of words." This requires no comment. The man who will speak of the bona fide observance of an oath as a mere technicality, and compare a solemn appeal to the God of the Bible, to the tabu of a heathen priest, is easily understood. Let such a one never use the term conscience, if he would not excite the most sickening disgust in the mind of every unperverted reader. "For our part," he says again, "we have proclaimed with trumpet tones that we never would abide by an agreement to play the scoundrel." Why, then, we would simply ask, will you play a part worse than that of the scoundrel, by offering to call God to witness that you will abide by such an agreement?

Let us advert for a moment to some of those circumstances which have ever been regarded as entering into the nature of an oath. In every solemn transaction of this kind, there are three parties: 1st, the taker; 2nd, the imposer; and 3rd, Almighty God. The oath is a solemn promise, in the Divine presence, that the one taking it will truly state what has happened, or will perform what is promised in the words employed; and as a penalty for its non-fulfilment, he solemnly imprecates upon himself the vengeance of that dread Being whose name he has invoked. Now, in the instance before us, let us ponder for a moment what might have been, and what, for the sake of argument, may be assumed to have been, the probable circumstances. The taker

is James G. Birney; the imposer is the people of the United States, through their representative, the Chief Justice of the National Judiciary. In the midst of assembled thousands, the said James G. Birney raises his hand to Heaven, or lays it upon that volume of our faith that contains so many fearful denunciations against trifling with the sacred name which is ever invoked in the oath, and swears by Him who liveth for evermore, and whose very essence is truth, that he will support and maintain the Constitution of the United States, and will faithfully perform the duties of that officer to whom is assigned, as his peculiar charge, that he will, without making any exception, execute the provisions of the said Constitution, and of the laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof. Let us suppose the solemn act concluded without reserve, exception, or qualification. The individual is inducted into office, and assumes the discharge of its duties. It is then that this strange principle of ethics begins to manifest itself. He refuses to perform certain acts most clearly required by the instrument. He is charged with perjury. What is the answer? It is true, I solemnly swore to their performance, as much as to any other parts. I knew that they were written in the Constitution and the laws. I have no doubt as to their meaning. I made no qualifying reserve. I felt at the time that the performance would require a breach of higher moral obligation. I have since entertained no new views, or made any subsequent discovery, which would require me to resign an office which I cannot fully and faithfully execute according to the understanding of the parties. I am, however, not guilty of false swearing, because had I offered any qualification, I could not have been allowed to take the oath, and "I should thus have dashed out my brains against a mere technicality for the benefit of slavery." Oh, conscience! conscience! If this is a sound and safe rule of eternal and immutable morality, when, and where, and how, we ask, can perjury be committed?

"Such parts of the Constitution," says Mr. Birney, "as are opposed to justice, humanity, and good morals, I reject as not parts of that instrument." The absurdity of this is so glaring, that even the author could not express himself in relation to it without palpable contradiction. Certain parts then, it would seem, admitted to be parts, are in the same sentence