I have no doubt that the generals of the United States, before attacking the Southern Confederacy, will recommend to the negroes to remain at peace, and will disavow and condemn acts of violence; but what is a manifesto against the reality of things and the necessity of situations?  There is a word that I see written in large letters everywhere in the projects of the South—­yes, the word catastrophe is to be read there in every line.  The first successes of the South are a catastrophe; the greatness of the South will be a catastrophe; and, if the South ever realize in part the iniquitous hopes towards which it is rushing, the catastrophe will acquire unheard-of proportions; it will be a St. Domingo carried to the tenth power.

One cannot, with impunity, give full scope to his imagination, and, in the year of our Lord 1861, set to work to contrive the plan of a Confederacy designed to protect and to propagate slavery.  These things will be avenged sooner or later.  Ah! if the South knew how important it is that it should not succeed, if it comprehended that the North has been hitherto its great, its only guarantee!  This is literally true; a slave country, above all, to-day, needs to be backed up by a free country to ensure the subsistence of an institution contrary to nature; otherwise the first accident, the first war, gives it over to perils that make us shudder.  Thanks to their metropolises, our colonies were able first to keep, and afterwards to enfranchise their slaves, without succumbing to the task.  But let a Southern Confederacy come, in which the immigration of the whites will be naught, while the increase of the blacks will be pursued in all ways, and, in case of success, the moment will soon arrive when many States will see themselves placed, as is the case already with South Carolina, in presence of a number of slaves exceeding that of free men.  Such a social monstrosity never existed under the sun; even in Greece, even in Rome, even among the Mussulmans, the total number of free men remained superior; the colonies alone, through the effect of the slave trade, presented an inverse phenomenon, and the colonies were consolidated with their metropolises in the same manner that the States of the South are consolidated with those of the North.

In this will be found, I repeat, a most important guarantee.  The South in rejecting it, and imagining itself able alone to maintain a situation which will become graver day by day, deludes itself most strangely.  At the hour of peril, when servile insurrection perhaps shall ravage its territory, it will be astonished to find itself left alone in the presence of its enemy.