“It is a dreadful state of things here in New York, where we feed upon Cotton, and have our very living in the smiles and favor of the South, to be hurting their feelings by talking so much about liberty and all that. A few more slaves set free, and the South will get angry again; and then New York will be in a world of trouble, and another call will call together another Castle Garden full of anxious merchants, all full of love to the South; and we shall have more sermons and more newspaper articles; and nobody can tell what will happen the next time. “In part, the South is at fault. It has sent North the wrong kind of negroes. Those who have run away, or been judicially sentenced to freedom, or been bought—all these have _loved liberty_. Now, won’t the South send us some of another sort—some of those model slaves that love bondage and wouldn’t take liberty if they could get it? With a few specimen copies of such, we believe that we could do Southern institutions great good in the North. *” Fifty-three follows in much the same line as that of the two years immediately preceding. Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in November last, takes the oath of office on the 4th of March. His inaugural gives expression to what was undoubtedly the general feeling of the country—a determination that the Compromise measures shall be enforced, and a fervent trust that the question of slavery has been settled; and in his annual message, upon the assembling of Congress in that year, promises that the peace which now so happily existed through the land should not be disturbed during his term of office, if he could prevent it. A large majority of the people, both North and South, were undoubtedly in perfect accord with this desire, greatly pleased with this assurance, and tried to share his confidence. Those were days in which a great deal of sympathy was felt in this country for the Irish, and by many, too, who were stanch opposers of liberty for the negro. Mr. Beecher had no patience with men, on either side of the Atlantic, whose sympathy was limited by the bounds of race or color; and when John Mitchel, who had posed as the “Great Irish Patriot” of that day, having escaped from an English penal colony and been received here with great enthusiasm, took occasion to state in an editorial in the _Citizen_, “We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion; we only wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama,” he (Mr. Beecher) enters into public correspondence with him, in which he denies the claims of the refugee to be an “apostle of liberty,” sorrows over his downfall, and dismisses him to the test of history in these words: