We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the management of our affairs, and the Central Government has fortunately had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague and alien to our ordinary habits of thought.  We have so long heard the principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of the nation legitimately expressed.  When such a contingency arises, it is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining.  It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers or by great opportunities.  If the manhood be there, it makes the great opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great danger out of the great opportunity.  The occasion is offered us now of trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or whether it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and selfish energy of protecting themselves from destruction.

The Republican Party has thus far borne itself with firmness and moderation, and the great body of the Democratic Party in the Free States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it.  Let us not be misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise.  Discontented citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but never open rebels with arms in their hands.  If there be any concessions which justice may demand on the one hand and honor make on the other, let us try if we can adjust them with the Border Slave-States; but a government has already signed its own death-warrant, when it consents to make terms with law-breakers.  First reestablish the supremacy of order, and then it will be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a compromise, when you give up your purse with a pistol at your head.  This is no time for sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the national hearth; all the chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of the children is to amuse itself with setting the house on fire, whenever it can find a match.  Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was