be understood that freedom is also an institution deserving some attention in a Model Republic, that a decline in stocks is more tolerable and more transient than one in public spirit, and that material prosperity was never known to abide long in a country that had lost its political morality.  The fault of the Free States in the eyes of the South is not one that can be atoned for by any yielding of special points here and there.  Their offence is that they are free, and that their habits and prepossessions are those of Freedom.  Their crime is the census of 1860.  Their increase in numbers, wealth, and power is a standing aggression.  It would not be enough to please the Southern States that we should stop asking them to abolish slavery,—­what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should abolish the spirit of the age.  Our very thoughts are a menace.  It is not the North, but the South, that forever agitates the question of Slavery.  The seeming prosperity of the cotton-growing States is based on a great mistake and a great wrong; and it is no wonder that they are irritable and scent accusation in the very air.  It is the stars in their courses that fight against their system, and there are those who propose to make everything comfortable by Act of Congress.

It is almost incredible to what a pitch of absurdity the Slave-holding party have been brought by the weak habit of concession which has been the vice of the Free States.  Senator Green of Missouri, whose own State is rapidly gravitating toward free institutions, gravely proposes an armed police along the whole Slave frontier for the arrest of fugitives.  Already the main employment of our navy is in striving to keep Africans out, and now the whole army is to mount guard to keep them in.  This is but a trifle to the demands that will be made upon us, if we yield now under the threats of a mob,—­for men acting under passion or terror, or both, are a mob, no matter what their numbers and intelligence.

A dissolution of the Union would be a terrible thing, but not so terrible as an acquiescence in the theory that Property is the only interest that binds men together in society, and that its protection is the highest object of human government.  Nothing could well be more solemn than the thought of a disruption of our great and prosperous Republic.  Even if peaceful, the derangement consequent upon it would cause incalculable suffering and disaster.  Already the mere threat of it, assisted by the efforts of interested persons, has caused a commercial panic.  But would it be wisdom in the Free States to put themselves at the mercy of such a panic whenever the whim took South Carolina to be discontented?  That would be the inevitable result of a craven spirit now.  Let the Republican party be mild and forbearing,—­for the opportunity to be so is the best reward of victory, and taunts and recriminations belong to boys; but, above all, let them be manly.  The moral taint of once submitting to be bullied is a scrofula that will never out of the character.