a gift to none more disastrous than themselves. In America, it is true that the populace have a far wider intelligence, they have much more cleverness, they are possessed of what we see one of their writers has termed "a preternatural sharpness." But underneath all this there is probably no more real wisdom, no greater amount of sound judgment. It is rather the precocity of the child than the wisdom of the man. And if we reflect upon the principles developed in a strike, we shall trace lineaments of the same portrait in American politics; we shall find indeed a very striking resemblance. There is the same influence of "sycophants," the same impatience of opposite opinion, the same contempt of economic laws, the same lurking desire to resort to the persuasion of force.

We conclude that these institutions, though they retain the form, have no longer the spirit of those designed by the fathers of the country. They no longer "insure justice," secure domestic tranquillity, or really further the "pursuit of happiness." The Union, a necessity when it was formed, has long ceased to be necessary. For very many years, though it has stimulated the rate of progress, yet underneath that superficial prosperity it has been working out that "degeneracy" and "demoralization" upon which we have read the testimony of the most eminent American authorities. If these be its results, showing that, whilst promoting the lower, it has debilitated all the nobler attributes

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of national life, we cannot but conclude that it has entirely ceased to conduce to the well-being of the nation. In this view, its disruption, though a rude and painful shock, must prove in the end an incalculable gain to both sections of the country. In what form the advantages of its termination may accrue, to each of them, will be subsequently considered. The next inquiry that naturally occurs, is the investigation of the causes that have produced that disruption at the present time.

CHAPTER III.

CAUSES OF THE DISRUPTION OF THE UNION.-BALANCE OF POWER.

HAVING examined what the Union has really become, and to what extent its political institutions have tended to increase all those original elements of dissolution which exist in all federal governments, we proceed to consider the immediate causes of its disruption. They may be classed, and will be most clearly examined, under three heads:

First. A political cause; the reversal of the balance of power, by the immigration into the Northern States.

Secondly. Embittered feeling; existing originally, but aggravated by the continued agitation of Northern Abolitionists.

Thirdly. Endangered interests; exposed now to the action of the Protectionist party, on their accession to permanent power.

No one will presume to assign the exact proportions in which these causes have combined to produce the present convulsion. Each of them has had greater weight than either of the others,

with some particular class in the South, but all have contributed to the common sentiment, and it may be doubted whether any one of them, alone, would have sufficed to sever the Union. In all revolutions, whatever the immediate cause of the catastrophe, it will be found that there has been a long train of accumulating causes, gradually sapping the foundations of loyalty to government, engendering discontent, or arousing animosity, and piling up, so to speak, the combustible materials which any accidental spark might kindle into a flame.

The collisions to which the question of Slavery has given rise have exercised a very large influence in producing the rupture; but Slavery has not been its principal cause, for it has never been in dispute; and, indeed, we shall find that many of the aggressive, and most reprehensible acts of the South, apparently in furtherance of the spread of its system, have really been measures of political defence. They have not had the extension of Slavery as an object of desire, as an end, but simply as a means by which to maintain its political position, in face of the rapidly increasing population of the Northern power.

If there be any one motive stronger than another in communities which have largely increased, that impulse is the desire of self-governWhen once aroused, it seems impossible to allay it. It is the eager and irrepressible desire of youth to assume the dignity of manhood, but

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strengthened and inflamed, as all passions are, by the accumulative influence of numbers. No other description of comfort, or profit, or luxury, will satisfy the craving when once aroused. There cannot be a more striking proof of this than in the revolt of the colonies from the rule of this country. There was no real hardship-no actual oppression. It was not the true object of that revolt to escape a duty of three pence per pound on tea, nor yet to maintain an abstract principle acted upon in no part of America, and unrecognized in most parts of the world. Its real object was independence; a desire to be their own masters. Curtis, in his "History of the Constitution," observes: "It was a war begun and prosecuted for the express purpose of obtaining and securing for the people who undertook it, the right of self-government."

The strength of this desire, when once excited, may be estimated by the obstacles then to be surmounted. There were bonds to be broken, perhaps more binding than any clauses of a written compact. There were the links of a common history, of no inglorious memory-the interwoven ties of relationship and ancestry-old associations of habits, of thought, of sympathy—and it might be, some trace, however faint, of the reverence of the offspring for the parent. The England of George the Third's time, whatever its faults, was England. It was not in the power of any error of a ministry, or imposition of a tax, or regulation of excise, to obliterate the fact that to her they owed