At the first glance, it appears an arduous, if not a hopeless undertaking, to address the minds of such nations as the North and Great Britain in defence of Southern slavery. We have to contend against the prescriptive opinions and prejudices of years' growth. We assert a thesis which our adversaries have taken pains to represent as an impossible absurdity, of which the very assertion is an insult to the understanding and heart of a freeman. Ten thousand slanders have given to the very name of Southern slaveholder a colouring, which darkens every argument that can be advanced in his favour. Yet the task of self-defence is not entirely discouraging. Our best hope is in the fact that the cause of our defence is the cause of God's Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience. For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text. It will in the end become apparent to the world, not only that the conviction of the wickedness of slaveholding was drawn wholly from sources foreign to the Bible, but that it is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic, and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of Terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the United States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism. Because we believe that God intends to vindicate His Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it; because we confidently rely in the force of truth to explode all dangerous error; therefore we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders. The anti-scriptural, infidel, and radical grounds upon which our assailants have placed themselves, make our cause practically the cause of truth and order. This is already understood here by thinking men who have seen Abolitionism bear its fruit unto perfection: and the world will some day understand it. We shall possess at this time another advantage in defending our good name, derived from our late effort for independence. Hitherto we have been little known to Europeans, save through the very charitable representations of our fraternal partners, the Yankees. Foreigners visiting the United States almost always assumed, that when they had seen the North, they had seen the country, (for Yankeedom always modestly represented itself as constituting all of America that was worth looking at.) Hence the character of the South was not known, nor its importance appreciated. Its books and periodicals were unread by Europeans. But now the very interest excited by our struggle has caused other nations to observe for themselves, and to find that we are not _Troglodytes_ nor _Anthropophagi_.