remain under its law.  Alas! it will see many other proofs of their devotion to servitude.  I do not like to bring bloody images, at which I shudder, too often before the eyes of the reader; it must be said, notwithstanding, while it is yet time, that the general Confederacy of the South, intoxicated with its projects, resolved to increase its possessions, forced to demand from the African slave trade the means of repeopling its States, depopulated by escape, and to install slavery into new territories, will draw upon it, not only the wrath of the United States, but the indignation of the entire world.  And what misery, what ruin will ensue from the first conflict!

I like better to fix my thoughts on the third hypothesis—­that of a return to the now broken Union.  Taught by experience, recognizing how little weight it has in the world since its separation from the United States, poor, weak, divided, comprehending the impossibility of realizing its true plans without exposing itself to calamities, losing its resources, one after another, even to the cultivation of cotton, which also demands credit and security, incapable of preventing the flight of its slaves, and not daring to brave that great power of public opinion which will interdict it the African trade, the Southern Confederacy, exhausted and dismayed, will perhaps one day prefer returning to the bosom of the Union, to plunging into the extremity of misfortune.  In this case, again, the question of affranchisement will have made vast strides.  The United States will have taken a decided position in the absence of the South, which its return cannot destroy; convictions will be fixed, the final impulse will have been given, and to this impulse, the South, come to repentance, will know that nothing is left it but to submit.

Finally comes a last hypothesis, which I mention because it is necessary to foresee every possibility.  Under the combined influence of the border States and the States of the North, equally desirous of maintaining the Union, the attempts of the extreme South will have failed, its secession will have lasted only a few months, and a compromise will have served to cover its retreat.  But what compromise could compensate for a fact so important as the election of Mr. Lincoln?  It has a deep significance which no compromise will remove; it signifies that the conquests of slavery are ended.  This proven, the future is easy to foresee:  increasing majorities in the North, increasing disproportion of the two parts of the Confederation.  At the end of the four years of a Lincoln administration, the slave States will have lost all hope of struggling, with their eight thousand whites charged with keeping four millions of blacks, against the twenty millions of citizens that inhabit the free States.  Let us add that, the future once fixed and the question of preponderance once resolved, many passions will moderate by degrees.  The number of free States will increase, not only by the settling of new territories,