While our government, like Giles in the old rhyme, is wondering whether it is a government or not, emissaries of treason are cunningly working upon the fears and passions of the Border States, whose true interests are infinitely more on the side of the Union than of Slavery.  They are luring the ambitious with visionary promises of Southern grandeur and prosperity, and deceiving the ignorant into the belief that the principles and practice of the Free States were truly represented by John Brown.  All this might have been prevented, had Mr. Buchanan in his Message thought of the interests of his country instead of those of his party.  It is not too late to check and neutralize it now.  A decisively national and patriotic policy is all that can prevent excited men from involving themselves so deeply that they will find “returning as tedious as go o’er,” and be more afraid of cowardice than of consequences.

Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon that side-issue.  The matter now in hand is the reestablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to use its power in self-defence.  The Republican Party has done all it could lawfully do in limiting slavery once more to the States in which it exists, and in relieving the Free States from forced complicity with an odious system.  They can be patient, as Providence is often patient, till natural causes work that conviction which conscience has been unable to effect.  They believe that the violent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to follow sooner or later the disruption of our Confederacy, would not compensate for the evil that would be entailed upon both races by the abolition of our nationality and the bloody confusion that would follow it.  More than this, they believe that there can be no permanent settlement except in the definite establishment of the principle, that this government, like all others, rests upon the everlasting foundations of just Authority,—­that that authority, once delegated by the people, becomes a common stock of Power to be wielded for the common protection, and from which no minority or majority of partners can withdraw its contribution under any conditions,—­that this Power is what makes us a nation, and implies a corresponding duty of submission, or, if that be refused, then a necessary right of self-vindication.  We are citizens, when we make laws; we become subjects, when we attempt to break them after they are made.  Lynch-law may be better than no law in new and half-organized communities, but we cannot tolerate its application in the affairs of government.  The necessity of suppressing rebellion by force may be a terrible one, but its consequences, whatever they may be, do not weigh a feather in comparison with those that would follow from admitting the principle that there is no social compact binding on any body of men too numerous to be arrested by a United States Marshal.