Those who seriously propose to stop all agitation on the subject of slavery, by causing the Abolitionists to refrain from proceedings which cause apprehension at the South, by silencing all who entertain sentiments the utterance of which is deemed a source of "danger to Southern institutions," by refraining themselves from all proceedings which will be looked upon with alarm by their fellow-citizens of the Slave States, can know very little of what would be required before the South were satisfied. The destruction of some million dollars' cost in school and text books would be one of the first things, and yet but a small item in the undertaking. Books which directly comment upon slavery are considered comparatively safe, because their purpose being defined, they can be guarded against. As is well understood, it is the insidious attacks of a free press that are most feared. But is it well understood what are felt to be "insidious attacks?" Some idea may be formed from the following passages which I take, not from the heated columns of a daily newspaper, but from the cool pages of the deliberate De Bow's "Review." The apprehension they express is not of to-day; in the first article from which I quote (which was published in the middle of Mr. Pierce's presidential term), reference is made to warnings of the same character which have been sounded from time to time before; and this very number of the "Review" contains a testimonial from fifty-five Southern senators and representatives in Congress to the "ability and accuracy" of its "exposition of the working of the system of polity of the Southern States."
"Our text books are abolition books. They are so to the extent of their
capacity.". . . "We have been too careless and indifferent to the
import of these things."
"And so long as we use such works as 'Wayland's Moral Science,' and the abolition geographies, readers, and histories, overrunning, as they do, with all sorts of slanders, caricatures, and blood-thirsty sentiments, let us never complain of their [northern Church people's] use of that transitory romance [Uncle Tom's Cabin]. They seek to array our children by false
