“The Union, the Constitution, and the friendship of the North:  these are the pillars on which rest the peace, the safety, the independence of the South.  The extraordinary thing is, that for some years past the South has been, and now is, sedulously employed in undermining this triple foundation of its power and safety.  Its extravagant pretensions, its excesses, its crimes, are rapidly cooling the friendship of the North,—­converting it, indeed, into positive enmity.  Its leading politicians are ever plotting and threatening disunion. disunion will he proffered to them from the North, not as a vague and passionate threat, but as a positive and well-considered plan, backed by a force of public opinion which nothing can resist.  Ere long, the South is likely to be left with no other defence than the Union it has weakened and the Constitution it has mutilated and defaced.

“The makers of the Kansas and Nebraska law were clumsy workmen.  They forgot to provide for the case of an anti-slavery President.  They will, perhaps, learn wisdom by experience.

  “’To wilful men
  The injuries that they themselves procure
  Must be their schoolmasters.’

“Those who framed the Constitution and laid the foundation of this Union understood their business better.  That Constitution was intended to protect the South, and has protected it.  Southern politicians cannot improve it.  For their own sakes they had better let it alone.”

We have given enough to show that in discussing Mr. Fisher we are dealing with two different men.  The field is now clear for the great political contest of 1860.  Mr. Fisher may have allied himself before this with the Republicans, or may look to have his anticipations fulfilled by that third party who are as unconscious of wrong as powerless to rectify it, “the world-forgetting, by the world forgot.”  We wish him well through his troubles.

A Dictionary of English Etymology. By HENSLEIGH WEDGWOOD, M. A. Late Fellow of Chr.  Coll.  Cam.  Vol.  I. (A-D.) London:  Truebner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row. 1859. pp. xxiv., 507.

There is nothing more dangerously fascinating than etymologies.  To the uninitiated the victim seems to have eaten of “insane roots that take the reason prisoner”; while the illuminate too often looks upon the stems and flowers of language, the highest achievements of thought and poesy, as mere handles by which to pull up the grimy tubers that lie at the base of articulate expression, shapeless knobs of speech, sacred to him as the potato to the Irishman.

The sarcasms of Swift were not without justification; for crazier analogies than that between Andromache and Andrew Mackay have been gravely insisted on by persons who, like the author of “Amilec,” believed that the true secret of philosophizing est celui de rever heureusement.  It is only within a few years that etymological investigations have been limited by anything; like scientific precision, or that profound study, patient thought, and severity of method have asserted in this, as in other departments of knowledge, their superiority to point-blank guessing and the bewitching generalization conjured out of a couple or so of assumed facts, which, even if they turn out to be singly true, are no more nearly related than Hecate and green cheese.