I think that I have gone over the whole series of hypotheses which offer any probability.  I have been careful to adopt none of them, for I make no pretension, thank God, to read the future.  It would be puerile to prognosticate what will happen, and not less puerile, perhaps, to describe it from what has happened.  In the face of the accidents in different directions which are attracting public attention and filling the columns of newspapers, I have attempted to make a distinction between what may happen and what must endure.  The lasting consequences of the present crisis are what I proposed to investigate faithfully.  The reader knows what are my conclusions.  It may be that it will end in the adoption of some blamable compromise; but whatever may be inscribed in it, the election of Mr. Lincoln has just written in the margin a note that will annul the text.  The time for certain concessions is past, and the South has no more doubts of it than the North.  It may be that the slave States will succeed in founding their deplorable Confederacy, but it is impossible that they should succeed in making it live; they will perceive that it is easier to adopt a compact or to elect a President, than to create, in truth, in the face of the nineteenth century, the nationality of slavery.

I have, therefore, the right to affirm that, whatever may be the appearances and incidents of the moment, one fact has been accomplished and will subsist:  the United States were perishing, and are saved.  Yes, whatever may be the hypothesis on which we pause, three new and decisive facts appear to our eyes:  we know that the North henceforth has the mastery; we know that the perils which threaten the Union came from the South and not from the North; we know that the days of the “patriarchal institution” are numbered.  Beneath these three facts, it is not difficult to perceive the uprising of a great people.

The victory of the North, the consciousness which it has of its strength and of its fixed resolution, whatever may be the appearances to the contrary, to circumscribe an evil which was ready to overflow on every side, is the first fact; there is no need to return to it.

As to the second, Carolina and Georgia have charged themselves with bringing it to light.  They have proved by their acts that abolitionism had been calumniated in accusing it of menacing the unity of the United States.  The secessionist passions have shown themselves in the other camp; there, upon the mere news of a regular election, have been sacrificed unhesitatingly the greatness, and, it would seem, the very existence of the country.  The proclamations from Charleston, and the shots fired on the Federal flag, have apprised us of what intelligent observers suspected already:  that the States for which slavery had become a passion and almost a mission, must some day experience the need of procuring to such a cause the security of isolation.