Department of Miscellany [pp. 245-257]

MISCELLANY.
grievance for them to agitate and discuss, and, in the absence of such a
catching watch-word as would excite the passions of the people, the downfall and destruction of the party were certain. Then did this party take
advantage of the animosity engendered by war. They raked the dying
embers together, fanned them into a flame, and preached wrath and desolation against the people of the South. Artfully the strings were pulled, and the
unconscious North may have believed that it was securing its own eternal
freedom by securing, as far as in it lay, the eternal slavery of the South.
It did not realize that one member of the body politic is affected by the
other, that there are diseases of sympathy as well as those of contagion. It
does not yet fully understand that the destruction of liberty in the South is
the danger of the liberty of the North, and that those who desire to kill the
freedom of ten millions of people will, when that crime is completed, turn
their strength to encompassing the ruin of the twenty millions that remain.
When they do understand this, the change of feeling will commence.
Nothing is expected as a matter of charity or brotherly love. Nothing
is expected but from motives of self-interest. But when stern events
teach the lesson that anarchy in the South means threatened anarchy in
the North;-that military dominion in Virginia and the Carolinas means
military dominion in Kentucky and Maryland;-that forcing universal suffrage upon the South means the attempt to enforce universal suffrage in the
North;-that the destruction of the constitutional rights of Alabama and
Georgia means a future meddling with the reserved rights of New York
and Massachusetts;-that illegality in the South means a consequent illegality in the North;-that confiscation of the lands of the Southern planter
means repudiation of the hoarded bonds of the New England financier;that negro Congressmen from the South means that in the North the negro
and the Radical are to be omnipotent, then the revulsion of feeling will
commence;-then those who flattered and petted the party of revolution
will wish that their tongues had been plucked from their throats ere they
gave a Radical one word of praise;-then those in the South who despaired
and turned back will be valued at their true price;-then the doctrines of
those who, in good or evil fortune, uphold the right against the might, and
assert the ways of eternal justice against the expedient paths of men, will
be honoured by every party and find some warm disciples in every struggling land.
4.-THE CITY OF MEMPHIS IN PERIL.
A correspondent of the Nashville Union and Dispatch having suggested
that Memphis was liable at any moment to "fall in" to a watery abyss
beneath it, caused by the subterranean flow of the Mississippi, the Memphis
Bulletin adds the following:
The river shore in the navy yard has rapidly disappeared. There steamers
rarely land. In front of the city proper there are always from ten to twenty steamers. By these the earth, at the water's edge, is protected and the
force of the surface current is broken. Hence it happens that the earth at
the water's edge, and for ten or twenty feet below, remains unbroken. The
great body of the mighty; tide of waters, forty and fifty feet below, rushes
onward in its unresisted course rending away the earth. How far the stream
passes beneath the city there is, of course, no means of ascertaining. The
explosion of torpedoes, forty or fifty feet below the river's surface, shook
every building West of the bayou. Beyond the bayou the shock was unheeded, unfelt.
Many years ago a saw mill was at work in the swamps of Arkansas,
twenty miles from the Mississippi. The owner awoke one bright morning
to find his well dry, in which the day before there was water three or four
feet deep. He cut a trench to a broad, long surface pond, not far away, and
was again supplied with an abundance of water. This trench connected
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