to declare themselves?  If they surmount the present temptation, (and they will never encounter a stronger one,) if they consent to sacrifice their immediate interests, and to renounce the traffic in slaves, which is in danger of ceasing from day to day in case they do not join the “Confederate States;” is such a resolution nothing? does it contain no guarantees for the future?  We do not set foot in the right path with impunity; honorable resolves always carry us further, thank God! than we counted on going.  Suppose even that the border States which refuse to unite with the South design to impose on the North certain vexatious conditions, they will be none the less turned from their former alliances, they will have none the less begun to move in a new direction.  We should do wrong if we did not recognize how honorable is the conduct of several among them; in watching over their legislatures, in enacting that the vote of secession shall be submitted to the ratification of the whole people, certain frontier States seem to have already shown themselves resolved to foil the intrigues at Charleston.

The cause of emancipation takes, therefore, a very important step in advance, in the hypothesis of a Southern Confederacy reduced, or nearly so, to the Gulf States alone.  Limited secession is perhaps of all combinations, the one most favorable to the suppression of slavery.  Picture to yourself, in fact, what this Southern Confederacy will he.  It will be an impossible, short-lived republic, the separation of which will one day cease, and which, meanwhile, will be incapable of realizing any of its favorite projects.  From the first hour, the extreme South found itself brought to face a dilemma:  either to draw in all the slave States, and then to await the moment favorable to the execution of its grandiloquent plans, to hasten towards its destiny, its ideal, to conquer territories, to people them with negroes, and to perish through the accomplishment of an impious work; or, to remain alone and undertake nothing, and still perish, but this time through impotence to exist.  What is to be done when there is only the miserable Confederacy of some thousand whites, the owners and keepers of some hundred thousand blacks?  Make conquests?  They dare not.  Open the slave trade?  It would draw down destruction upon them.

Now, mark that, in the bosom of a Confederacy morally isolated from the entire world, receiving aid neither from immigrants nor capital, deprived, in a large part at least, of the fresh supply of negroes which it formerly drew from the North, unable even to incur the risk of imitating Spain, which buys free negroes from the slave-hunters of the African continent, not in a condition to stop the escapes which will take place on all her frontiers, the question of slavery will proceed necessarily towards its solution.  The extreme South, strange to say, will find itself placed providentially as an obstacle between the United