Suppose these projects to become, some day, realities, we may ask whether a real weakening of the United States would be the result.  Suppose even that another secession, based on different motives, which nothing foretells at present, should take place beyond the Rocky Mountains; suppose that a Pacific republic should some day be founded, would the American Confederation have reason to be greatly troubled at witnessing the formation on her sides of the association of the gulf States, California, and Oregon?  Look at a map, and you will see that the valley of the Mississippi, and of the lakes, and the shores of the Atlantic, are not necessarily connected either with the Gulf of Mexico, (save the indispensable outlet at New Orleans,) or the regions beyond the great desert and the Rocky Mountains, the land of the Mormons and the gold-diggers.  Unity is not always the absolute good, and it may be that progress must come through disruption.  Who knows whether instantaneous secession would not perform the mission of resolving certain problems otherwise insoluble?  Who knows whether slavery must not disappear in this wise in the very effort that it makes to strengthen itself through isolation?  Who knows whether it is not important to the prosperity and real power of the United States to escape from theories of territorial monopoly, those evil counsellors but too much heeded?  Who knows, in fine, whether the day will not come, when, the questions of slavery once settled, new federal ties will again bind to the centre the parts that stray from it to-day?

I put these questions; I make no pretensions to resolve them.  In any case, the imagination has had full scope for some time past.  People have not been satisfied with the Southern Confederacy; have they not invented both the pretended Pacific Confederacy which I have just mentioned, and the central Confederacy, in which the border States will take shelter in common with two or three free States, as Pennsylvania and Indiana?  Have they not supposed, in the bargain, (for they seem to find it necessary to discover the dissolution of the Union every where at all costs,) that the agricultural population of the West, discontented with the tariff recently adopted, and putting in practice the new maxim, according to which they are to have recourse to separation, instead of pursuing reforms, will seek an asylum in Canada?  I need not discuss such fables.  I am convinced, for my part, that the principle of American unity is much more solid than people affirm; I see in the United States a single race, and almost a single family:  they may divide, they will not cease to be related.  The relationship will take back its rights.  For the time, however, secession seems to have a providential part to enact.  It facilitates, in certain respects, the first steps of Mr. Lincoln; thanks to it, the hostile majority in the Senate is blotted out, the uncertainty of the House of Representatives is decided, the Government