Extracts.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VII, Issue 439, 17 January 1857, Page 4

Extracts.

AFFAIRS OF THE STATES. (From the Times, September 22.^ We live in an' age of reactions. Despotism has within the last ten years made a decided advance in Europe. The Papal power has regained considerable ground -which it had lost, and Austria has receded from the reforms of the Emperor Joseph. The Anglo Saxon race is the only great power which never recedes, which maintains one uniform progress, and never abandons one inch of ground won in the cause of civil and religious liberty. For a thousand years this country has been advancing in one direction ; its course has been slow, but it began early, and when it had once begun it never stopped; the nation moved onward, like the glacier, by the ninjestic force of an irresistible weight; every concession which power made to liberty was calmly stored up and made the ground and. reason for an additional one, till the accumulation has reached its present height, and become the existing British Constitution. There seems to be a danger, however, now of a retrograde step even in the sternly uniform progress of the Anglo-Saxon ; a falter is seen in that movement which has hitherto been steady and sure like that of fate itself, and it appears for the moment undecided which way he will go, backwards or forwards, —whether he will stand by the traditions of ages, carry on the policy of his race, and maintain the great cause of human liberty, or whether he would halt, dfverge, and abandon his charge. We allude to the great cause now at stake in the struggle of Kansas. The progress of the antislavery cause was, like eveiy other battle for liberty which the Anglo-Saxon has conducted, from the first moment that it commenced in this country, one steady movement towards success, which it at last attained by the act of 1833. Among our kinsmen of the United Stafes : the same cause, though prevented by the much greater difficulties which encumbered it across the Atlantic from attaining the same success, has, at any rate, never gone back. Slavery, where established, has been allowed to hold its ground, as a matter of common pecuniary justice to the proprietors, and as an advantage even to the slave, until some practicable and safe mode of escape from the system could be found. It has been tolerated as a necessary evil, in the original establishment of which the whole community was implicated, and of which the cure, therefore, ought not to be made at~the cost of the class only ; but the whole basis on which the matter has stood has been provisionary. While the respect for the lights of property has prot;acted the system within its own limits, it has always been looked - upon as confined to those limits, as an insulated institution which was to be allowed to occupy for the interim its old ground, but not to spread or expand, But/the present crisis in Kansas threatens an actual spread aud expansion of slavery within the Union. The planter is changing his toleration for victory, and upon the Anglo-Saxon ground of the United States we have now literally to face the imminent danger of a positive and strong reaction in favour of slavery. The slaveowner has already triumphed in Congress, and cut away the proviso which tied the hands of a pro slavery Executive. The Federal forces of the United States can now. march into Kansas, suppress the last efforts of a freestate party, already reduced by recent defeats, and establish the Missouri Legislature. With the establishment of this Legislature slavery will be the law of Kansus ; and slavery, once established in Kansas, will command all America beyond

Kansas as far as the Pacific, to the total subversion of the present relative position of the two parties in the Union. What a retrograde movement for a great AngloSaxon Government and people. A fresh planters' conquest, a new empire of slavery to be formed at this time of day, and on soil akin to| British ! It sounds as uncongenial to our ears as a new barbarian irruption, a New Norman conquest. Can it be true that the time has come of what historians call the corruption of a race, and that the struggle of parties in the United States, the thirst for office, the greediness and rapacity which will form alliance with anybody rather than miss the spoils, the ballet-box and the bowie knife, have so far debased the Anglo-Saxon that he forgets the whole mission, and policy of his race, and sinks into the friend and tool of the slaveowner.

But we will not forecast so melancholy and dark an issue. The American prospect is at present clouded, but it not seldom happens that the time of real danger to a cause is the time from which its ultimate triumph and success date. When " the North" sees itself on the edge of this precipice it will surely awake; —it will see that it has allowed a "party weak, in numbers, in argument, in moral tone, to defeat it by mere superior diplomacy and more wily strategies. It will see what unanimity has done for a comparatively small political section, and it will take a lesson by the example. We may—we must —expect a rise in the enthusiasm of " the North," when it has caught the sense of danger, and sees where the present crisis is landing it. An ignominious future is indeed before the Northern, unless he rouses himself in real earnest to ward it off.—dragged at the chariot-wheel of the Southern planter, and compelled to see the whole strength of the Union given to an extension of slavery,— compelled}- therefore, to see himself, by the simple fact of his being a member of the federation, supporting the cause of slavery. A tolerated slavery is one thing, and a propagandist slavery is another. No sensible man will demand sudden changes or violate property ; but will the North allow a triumphant and an expanding institution of slavery ? Will it stand by and see itself made, against its will and in spite of its protests, an auxiliary to that extension, giving the weight of its name to a federation which has formally adopted a retrograde policy ? Will the north allow itself to be leaned upon as a convenient buttress by a section of the Union which could not support itself, and to be used for the purpose uf giving security to the Southern planter, who without such assistance would have immediately to arm and convert his occupation of the South into a military one, to keep in order a slave population out-numbering him tenfold ?

We may expect to hear, then, before long, of new movements in the Northern States of the Union. More than this, such a contest as this cannot convulse the United States without exciting feeling among ourselves. The English pubiic are at present entirely mute on the subject of Kansas simply because that not one man in ten knows what Knnsas is or where it is, or what people are fighting about. When it is once understood that that struggle involves a reaction against the principle of human freedom, the propagandism of slavery, the threatened revival of a cause on which the national hatred is so deeply fixed, English feeling will undoubtedly awake, and English sympathy will everywhere back up " the North." We are interested parties in the contest. Slavery cannot triumph in America without discredit to the Anglo-Saxon name and the downfall of the boast that the Anglo-Saxon never retrogrades.