The affair is scarcely begun, we answer; one must be blind not to see it.  What is ended, is only the first skirmish.  As to the war, it will be as long, believe me, as the life of the two principles which are struggling in America.  Let Mr. Lincoln assure himself, and let the European adversaries of slavery remember as well, that it will be necessary to combat and to persevere.  Never was a more obstinate and more colossal strife commenced on earth.  Many of the border States will not be long in raising pretensions to which they will join threats of new secessions; they will again bring up the question of the Territories, and will propose compromises.  Who knows? they will aspire perhaps to establish, in the interests of the extreme South, the extradition of slaves escaped from the rival Confederacy.  Who knows again? they will perhaps attempt to restore their domestic slave trade with Charleston and New Orleans.

This is not all.  The time will come when the extreme South, incapable of enduring the life that it has just created for itself, will demand to return to the bosom of the Union.  It will then insist on dictating its conditions; it will propose the election of a general convention charged with reconstructing the Constitution of the United States; it will appeal to the selfishness of some, and to the ambition or even the patriotism of others, presenting to their sight the re-establishment of the common greatness which separation had compromised.  What a motive to veil principles for a moment! what a temptation to return to the fatal path so lately forsaken!

I know very well that it will be henceforth impossible to return to it completely; nevertheless, the vigilance of Mr. Lincoln will not cease to be necessary, and what will be no less necessary, is the moral support which we are bound to lend him in the hour of success and in the hour of discouragement, in good and in bad reputation.  Where do we find a more glorious cause than this? despite the impure alloy which is mingled with it, of course, as with all glorious causes, is it not fitted to stir up generous hearts?  Already, thanks to the defeat of the democratic party, the United States that we once knew, those of the last ten years, those that the South governed with its wand, those whose institutions were corrupted and debased by slavery, those who numbered in the North as in the South so many fortunes based openly on the slave traffic, those who had seen among their Presidents a slave merchant, carrying on his speculations in public view—­these United States have just ended their career, they have entered the domain of history, their disappearance has been verified by the retreat of the extreme South.