lar, and Jacobinical, the end of which must be anarchy or despotism.

The South never has "calculated,” and never will "calculate," the value of the Union. Without a trace of mercenary feeling in her nature, without counting its advantages or disadvantages, she clings to it with filial affection as a thing to be reverenced, and too sacred for traffic or speculation. We are well aware that, by enormous concessions of territory, and by acquiescing in a system of unequal taxation, we have contributed a large excess over our quota to the common stock; but we find our compensation in the development and prosperity of our common country. Whatever concerns it, or any part of it, interests us, and we have ever been willing to make any sacrifice short of a constitutional right. With this sentiment for the country and for the Union deeply rooted in the South, we contemplate a dissolution as men contemplate the extinction of their long-cherished and fondest hopes. But we have no misgivings as to our future. Our tranquillity would scarcely be disturbed. The state governments would quietly perform their functions, and in sixty days a new federation would be formed. We may be called secessionists, but may we not, in the event of a separation, claim to be the government de jure? We stand inside of and upon the Constitution, and only separate to maintain the guaranties of that sacred instrument. What should we have to fear? What army or navy would act against us? Where would the money come from to reduce us to subjection? Our phys ical power and military spirit are known to the world. "War," said Gen. Greene, in his Southern campaign, "war in the South is a very different thing from war at the North." The feeble colony of South Carolina exhausted the well-organized and powerful army of England, and her swamps and forests proved more formi

dable than British garrisons and forts. It is folly to talk of coercing the South. We laugh at such a threat, as we laugh at the mean and dastardly idea that our slaves would join our assailants. Why did they not join the British in the war of the Revolution and of 1812? On the contrary, in every crisis they havo manifested their fidelity, and would fight, if necessary, by the side of their masters, for homesteads dear to them as to the whites, and which they rarely desert but when deluded by some scoundrel of lighter complexion. They constitute for us a material element of strength in war, and the means of subsistence for our armies in the field.

With respect to foreign powers, our productions will always secure for us their good-will. The South had little cause to quarrel with England for any local grievance in either the war of independence or the war of 1812. We might have lived unmolested under British dominion. But we took up arms for our Northern brethren, whose commerce was tampered with, and whose seamen were impressed. British negromania, which our Northern friends count on, has run its career. The practical lesson of the West Indies, onco the most prosperous, now the most unprofitable part of her broad domain, has brought England to her senses. Our cotton crop is indispensable to her, and cotton can not be produced without slave labor, and compulsory slave labor. Algeria, India, Africa, as rivals of the South in the production of cotton, are humbugs. Production is regulated by laws. more immutable and controlling than fanaticism. The laws of trade are omnipotent in England. We watch ber harvest-weather, and she notes our sunshine and our showers. She buys our crops; we purchase her manufactures. The South has similar relations with France. Our free-trade doctrines welcome her beautiful fabrics and her delicious wines. Our plantation necessities de

mand the manufactures of these great nations. They will take in return, in their own shipping, our cotton, sugar, tobacco, bread-stuffs, lumber, and naval stores. We have neither manufactories nor shipping, but are purely agricultural, with free trade for our allies, and non-intercourse and prohibitory duties for our enemies. With such relations as these, is it likely that England or France will quarrel with the South about the institution of slavery?

When we are forced, in self-defense, to separate from the fanatic states; when our harbors are crowded, not with bottoms from Boston and New York, but with foreign shipping, and our warehouses are packed, not with the manufactures of Lowell and Newark, but of Manchester and Lyons; then, and not till then, will our Northern brethren perceive, in its whole extent, the folly of their course. The fall of real estate in their cities, the silence of their spindles, the stagnation of their commerce, the obstructions to their enterprise, will teach them how insane it was to intermeddle with a great interest antecedent to the Union, guaranteed by the Constitution, auxiliary to their prosperity, indispensable to ours, and the greatest consolidated element of national wealth.

When they ask us to surrender slavery, and its natural extension in territories adapted to its growth, they ask in the spirit of a footpad who demands your purse with a pistol at your breast. When they interfere with it by the law-making power, they exercise a function that finds no warrant in the Constitution. When they attempt, as they have attempted, to arm our slaves against us, and instigate a peaceful and contented people to the commission of crimes, they sever the bonds of Union, and drive us to seek shelter and safety under a separate and distinct government. We separated from England

for the mere assertion of a right which she was willing to qualify or surrender, and which had never occasioned any actual evil. When we leave the present Union, we shall leave it to preserve our property from spoliation, our homesteads from rapine and murder. We shall stand justified in our own conscience and before mankind; justified as every people stand justified in history, who, having patiently endured injustice for the sake of peace, finally draw the sword for the sake of independence. We shall quit the Union, be that day of sorrow early or late, as loyal to its covenants as when first our fathers formed it, loving and regretting it to the last; glorying in its carly traditions and mourning its sudden fall; ever mindful of the patriot friends at the North who have co-operated with us to maintain it, and reserving for them the places of honor around our altars and firesides; but with the resolution, inflexible as destiny, to defend our rights in their whole extent, or perish with them!

The election of a Black Republican President, under the formalities of law, does not necessarily involve a dissolution of the Union, but it will be conclusive as to the existence of a public sentiment that will abolish slavery if the present Union be continued. The election of such a candidate now, or ten years hence, is only a question of time. In its practical teaching it is the same thing. Political partics of fifty years' growth are powerless, and now enjoy only a temporary and precarious lease by the compulsory fusion of antagonistical materials; a compact based on no common creed, no mutual concession of principle, but a mere bargain of individuals for office, dictated by inexorable necessity. On the other hand, opposition to slavery is a consolidated power, moving in one direction, by ono impulse, its whole strength concentrated upon a single object. But yesterday a "still, small

voice" whispering in tabernacles, to-day shaking the Alleghanies with its thunder, and sweeping like a hurricane from the Atlantic to the Missouri. Small rivers, thus directed, cut their way through mountains of granite. Parchment restraints and judicial interpretation oppose but feeble barriers to the force of numbers, composed of new elements and nationalities, and utterly indifferent to the traditions of our ancestors. The Puritan and the Jacobin are in fearful propinquity. Excited multitudes are not to be restrained even by their leaders, who, having tasted power, are apt to become conservative. Danton and his comrades were butchers of mankind, but butchers more sanguinary still demanded their blood. The great party that now demands the non-extension of slavery and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law will, in the next decade, demand universal emancipation! This is the danger we have to look in the face-not merely the election of a chief magistrate pledged to exclude slavery from the Territories, and to annul the decisions of the constitutional tribunal, but the next great act in the drama-the abolition of slavery itself! This is already down in the programme. Seward has foreshadowed it in all his recent speeches, and the deed will be accomplished if this Union be maintained. The weight of numbers, if not against us now, soon will be, if anti-slavery progress for the last five years be reliable data for calculating its future. Even now, when its preponderance is not firmly established,

proposes no compromise-if we could make any more compromises with safety or honor-but proclaims its purpose, and pledges itself never to recede. Our decision, must be made, and made speedily, and there is no halfway ground to stand upon. Surrender or resist are the only alternatives of the South-surrender to an exacting party who advocate the debasing equality of races, and