declared openly the principles on which they have all along been secretly acting.  Denying the constitutionality of special protection to any other species of property or branch of industry, and in 1832 threatening to break up the Union unless their theory of the Constitution in this respect were admitted, they went into the late Presidential contest with a claim for extraordinary protection to a certain kind of property already the only one endowed with special privileges and immunities.  Defeated overwhelmingly before the people, they now question the right of the majority to govern, except on their terms, and threaten violence in the hope of extorting from the fears of the Free; States what they failed to obtain from their conscience and settled convictions of duty.  Their quarrel is not with the Republican Party, but with the theory of Democracy.

The South Carolina politicians have hitherto shown themselves adroit managers, shrewd in detecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men; but their experience has not been of a kind to give them practical wisdom in that vastly more important part of government which depends for success on common sense and business-habits.  The members of the South Carolina Convention have probably less knowledge of political economy than any single average Northern merchant whose success depends on an intimate knowledge of the laws of trade and the world-wide contingencies of profit and loss.  Such a man would tell them, as the result of invariable experience, that the prosperity of no community was so precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on a single agricultural product.  What divinity hedges cotton, that competition may not touch it,—­that some disease, like that of the potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of Ireland and Madeira?  But these South Carolina economists are better at vaporing than at calculation.  They will find to their cost that the figure’s of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech, which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising money.  The eating of one’s own words, as they must do, sooner or later, is neither agreeable nor nutritious; but it is better to do it before there is nothing else left to eat.  The secessionists are strong in declamation, but they are weak in the multiplication-table and the ledger.  They have no notion of any sort of logical connection between treason and taxes.  It is all very fine signing Declarations of Independence, and one may thus become a kind of panic-price hero for a week or two, even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illustrated press; but these gentlemen seem to have forgotten, that, if their precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous amount.  It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of an autonomous palmetto republic