amusement. This is a great charm in comedy. Perhaps it is allowable for comedy to be cast in a sterner mood occasionally, but it is certainly one of the highest arts of a comic writer to preserve even amidst ridicule this sense that our condemnation does not go very deep. It keeps comedy in its right place-and it is not a very high place-among the agents of moral improvement. It is not always that even Mr. Dickens succeeds in producing this impression; and because he produces it in this work so happily is among the special reasons why warm admirers of his genius are especially fond of Martin Chuzzlewit. ART. VII. THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA. The New York Times. January to April 1861. WHEN our last Number issued from the press, a mighty catastrophe hung over the great Republic of the West,-a catastrophe which many hoped might be averted, and which nearly every one combined to deprecate. We shared neither of these prevailing sentiments: we were satisfied that the menaced disruption was inevitable, and we even ventured to think it was desirable. Far from seeing in it only the seeds of evil, we hoped then, and we hope still, that it will be overruled for good. The gloom may be terrible, and the storm devastating for a while, but it will purify an unwholesome atmosphere and clear a lowering sky. Intonuit lævum: it is ominous of sunshine and of calm. When political and social problems have reached such a point of gravity and complication that man's wisdom cannot pierce them, and man's courage dare not face them, and man's resources cannot solve them, then crises and convulsions, however strange and awful, may without presumption be looked upon as Heaven's intervention in a dignus vindice nodus. When Irish pauperism and Irish multitudes baffled the efforts of statesmanship and philanthropy alike, the Irish famine removed the difficulty, but removed it in a way which no one could have dared to pray for or have incurred the responsibility of causing, -nay, which humanity compelled every one ineffectually to try to thwart, while confessing that it opened perhaps the only avenue to hope and salvation for the future. In like manner, the most promising young nation of the modern world, as we showed in our last Number, was sliding down a quick incline of degeneracy which it seemed impossible to arrest, and was weighted by a grievous social sin and burden which it seemed impossible to lift off:-may not the severance of the Union prove the means of rescue out of both calamities? Is it not, if rightly regarded, one of those OPPORTUNITIES which are God's richest and rarests gifts to nations? Nothing but sheer obligation drives us to handle this subject. It would be an unworthy dereliction in a journal like the National Review to pass over in silence the great event of the year, and one of the greatest events of our times; but there is nothing alluring in it, under any point of view, to writers who have both convictions and sympathies to cramp them. What we have to say will therefore be said in few words. It would be rash and dangerous to prophesy; it would be tedious merely to epitomise and narrate; it would be simply weak and silly to shudder and to preach :-we shall content ourselves with an attempt to place the real grounds of the quarrel, and the true position and prospects of the combatants, in as clear a light as we are able. We cannot, of course, hope to influence American proceedings; but we may do something to direct English sympathy and English action. In the first place, we put aside all the disputes about the right of secession, on which so much paper and passion has been wasted, as idle logomachy. All that has been published on this matter by either side reads like the very pedantry of special pleading. Where disputants are subjects of one authority which both acknowledge and revere, the decision of that authority settles the question of right, inasmuch as it makes it by announc ing it, and the discussion of abstract justice merges in that of actual power. When there is a written or an immemorial law. to appeal to, and a recognised tribunal at once empowered to decree and able to enforce, the controversy may be determined by elaborate argument and a judicial verdict. But when eight millions of freemen wish to take any particular step, and believe that they are entitled to take it, the only argument which it is not futile and childish to oppose to them is that of force. We may say to them, "you shall not," it is absurd to say "you may not." They think they may, they are resolved that they will; and they must be the judges in their own case, for the simple reason that they will not accept their antagonists as judges; any umpire to whom the dispute may be referred must be selected by themselves; there exists no supreme Areopagus to which appeal can, without impertinence, be made, unless it can be clearly shown that some law of natural and eternal morality is broken. When a few citizens or subjects feel or fancy themselves injured or oppressed, become seditious and disobedient, secede, or take up arms against the sovereign authority, they are crushed because they are weak, they are punished because they are rebels, they are not harangued or chastised as sinners; -if they are really aggrieved, we consider them as foolish, not as wrong. If their grievances are sufficiently heavy and their numbers sufficiently great to enable them to resist, insurge, or secede, with success, we do not blame them then, we applaud them their might has made their right. The subjects of Francis II. of Naples were entitled to discard him, and hand over their allegiance to Victor Emanuel: this we all allow; but then (perhaps we plead) Francis II. was perfidious and cruel. Leopold of Tuscany, however, was neither, yet we agree that his subjects were entitled to desert him, and annex themselves to Piedmont, because they chose to do so, and because it was well for Italy that they should do so. Is it not clear, according to all unprejudiced sense, that whatever nations, or those great sections of them which may be called "peoples," desire to do, and believe it to be their duty to do, they must be held to have a right to do, unless it be immoral, i. e. unjust, perfidious, cruel, or licentious? It may be foolish in them to exercise this right; but nations have a right to be foolish, or they may differ from us, and believe that to be wise which we see (or think) to be foolish. "But," say the Northern pleaders, "they have broken a contract. They agreed to form part of one State with us, and they have seceded." The answer is obvious. The same people, the same authorities, who formerly agreed to join you, now wish to leave you. The same capacity which formed the partnership must be competent to dissolve it. No contract of the kind can be eternal, inasmuch as option is an inherent claim in human beings, and can never be permanently abnegated or taken away -not even by themselves, still less by their ancestors for them. It seems impossible, for freemen at least, to argue that Belgium had a right to separate from Holland, that Greece had a right to separate from Turkey, that Tuscans, Emilians, Romans, and Neapolitans had a right to cashier their monarchs and to join Sardinia ;-and yet that the Gulf States had not a right to secede from the Union, and form a confederation among themselves. The original voluntariness of the connection confirms the right instead of impairing it. The secession may have been scandalously and treacherously contrived; it may have been a blunder, it may have been unwarranted by any real grievances, it may have been carried out in the most offensive and overbearing manner; but the right of seceding, i. e. of undoing by the sovereign will of the people what was once done by that sovereign will-cannot, we think, be denied. If one State only, and that a feeble State, had determined to secede, its secession would have been, not controverted as a right, but prevented as a fact. The second reflection that forces itself upon us is that Disruption-so much deplored, which has come upon the world as a surprise, and upon the Northern Americans as an amazement and an almost ideal horror-was always natural and inevitable, and has long been imminent. Washington foreboded it in the far distance, and turned away his face in pain and sorrow. Tocqueville foresaw it, speculated on its mode, and distinctly indicated its causes. He saw that the enormous extent of the country, to which settlement and conquest were yearly adding, precluded its being ruled otherwise than as a loosely-knitted Federation, which the weakness of the Central Government, and the strength of the State Governments-and still more the growing weakness of the one, and the growing strength of the other-were insensibly severing year by year so rapidly and so decisively, that the first serious collision of interest or temper must infallibly entail a severance; and that a severance must be attended with so many sources of bitterness and soreness as most probably to bring with it actual hostilities, and to leave behind it savage enmities. This, too, was before slavery became the prominent topic it has been of late. Indeed, it seems wonderful how any dispassionate and close observer, who looked at the United States from the outside, could hesitate to pronounce disruption to be, not only the fate, but the euthanasia of the unwieldy and unprecedented Commonwealth. Every thing is changed since the days of 1789, when the Federation was first definitively formed. Severance seems as much dictated by circumstances now as union was dictated by circumstances then. The United States were then thirteen in number, they are thirty-three now. Their area was then 820,000 square miles, it is 2,960,000 now. Their population was 4,000,000 then, it is 32,000,000 now. Their territory was then little more than a broad slip along the Atlantic seaboard, every State, with the exception of Vermont, having a frontage on the ocean. Their territory now extends over 55 degrees of longitude and 21 of latitude, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Maine to California, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, from the tropic of Cancer to the frozen fogs of Nova Scotia. The staple article of one province is ice; the staples of another are cotton and sugar. How should the garment that suited one age and one magnitude suit an age and a magnitude so utterly transformed? How can the lumberers of Maine combine in a government with the gold-diggers of Californiaespecially across a desert inhabited by thriving Mormons, who already claim a seat in Congress and a contingent inheritance of the presidential chair? How are the stiff Puritan of Massa chusetts and the fiery French Creole of New Orleans to harmonise in one Cabinet and one Congress? But this is not all. Even in the days of Washington there were inherent differences of origin, character, and temper between the Northern and the Southern provinces. Their people came, indeed, from one country, but they came from very different classes, and colonised under widely diverse circumstances and from widely alien motives. Pilgrim Fathers colonised the North, gallant and greedy adventurers settled in the South. The first sought religious freedom, the second sought golden wealth. The former were Nonconformists, Roundheads, Republicans by temper, by capacity, by antecedents: the latter were Cavaliers, Churchmen, sometimes noble gentlemen, often scamps and scapegraces, occasionally downright buccaneers. Accident, mutual interests, mutual services, mutual passions, united them into one federation-never blended them into one people. Year by year, generation by generation, the discrepancies between them have been growing greater, and the incongruities and discomforts of the connection have been more clearly perceived and more strongly felt. Other elements of difference, too, have been introduced. The purchase of Louisiana has brought a large French, or bastard French, population into the citizenship of the South; the Irish immigration has brought a still larger, if not more questionable, Celtic population to taint the citizenship of the North. Hundreds of thousands of Germans, too, who resemble neither of the English sections of the original inhabitants, have become naturalised throughout the country. Swarms of them have stayed in Pennsylvania, swarms have gone to Texas, swarms have located themselves in the backwoods. Altogether we may estimate that the number of Americans of foreign birth or descent in the United States exceeds the number of citizens of Anglo-Saxon origin existing there when America first became a nation. The approach to homogeneousness, therefore, which existed in the days of Washington and Franklin has ever since been in process of obliteration; and the characteristics which all classes of Americans undoubtedly still have in common are not those which they would wish to be considered as national distinctions. But even these do not exhaust all, or even the chief, influences which rendered the continuance of the Union precarious, and its permanence all but impossible. When the Constitution of 1789 was framed, slavery was a misfortune, a disgrace to be slurred over and hushed up, a social embarrassment much to be deprecated and as soon as practicable to be got rid of. This was the consentaneous feeling of all, whether Northerners or Southerners. Slavery is now in the eyes of the South a "che |