Such is the respective position.  Men will agitate, are agitating already, about the new President, to take away from his thoughts and designs this resolute character which makes their force.  They attempt to demonstrate to him, not only that Fort Sumter, so easy to revictual under Mr. Buchanan, has now become inaccessible to aid, and that no other course remains than to authorize its surrender; but that Fort Pickens itself should be surrendered to the South, in order to reserve every chance of reconciliation and in no degree to assume the responsibility of civil war!  I hope that Mr. Lincoln will know how to resist these enfeebling influences.  After having demonstrated to him that it is necessary to deliver up the forts, they will demonstrate to him that it is necessary to renounce the blockade, which is not tenable without the forts; then, who knows? they will demonstrate to him finally that it is necessary to sign some disgraceful compromise, and submit almost to the law of the rebels.

Once more, it is prudent to foresee every thing, and it is for this that I mention such things.  I count, moreover, on their not being realized.  In electing Mr. Lincoln, the United States decided thus:  Slavery will make no more conquests.  What they have decided, they will ultimately maintain, even though they should have the air of abandoning it.  They have respected and they will respect the sovereignty of the States; upon this point they will give all the guarantees that may be desired, and Congress, we have seen, has already voted an amendment to the Constitution, designed to offer this basis of compromise.  But they will go no further than this; the North must feel that, of all ways of terminating the present crisis, the most fatal would be the disavowal of principles and the desertion of the flag.

The compromises that promise any thing more than respect for the sovereignty of the States in the matter of slavery, promise more than they could perform; every one feels this, in the South as in the North.  The policy of the South forms a whole of which nothing subsists if any thing be retrenched, and above all if the complicity of the Government ceases to be assured to it.  On the day that the South accepts any compromise whatever, it will have renounced, not the maintenance doubtless, but the propagation of slavery; it will have renounced its rule.  Compromises, (there will be such, perhaps, let us swear to nothing; before or after the war, with the entire South, or with a part of it,) compromises will be signed henceforth without any delusion.  The South knows, marvellously well, that these compromises will bear little resemblance to those signed in former times.  Those marked, by their constantly increasing pretension, the upward march of the South; these will mark the phases of its decline.  How many changes which can never be retraced!  No more conquests to promote slavery, no more reopening of the African slave trade, no more