When, by such a course, the proper relations and functions of each State should be resumed, there would no longer be any matter of State pride to interfere with the absolute assertion of national authority.  The new State governments would be protected against armed assailants at home and invasion from abroad; they would apply for and obtain assistance to suppress domestic insurrection; every misguided insurgent would have opportunity to return to his duty under the protection of his own local authorities; appropriations for the army and navy could be passed with the aid of Tennessee and Alabama votes in Congress; and Davis, and Tyler, and Mason be hung upon the verdict of a jury of the vicinage.

In Virginia, a movement based upon this principle has been already inaugurated.  From Western Virginia, the progress toward Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama is natural and certain.  The worst case to deal with, unquestionably, is South Carolina.  Hers is a peculiar people, and zealous, though scarcely of good works.  That fiery little Commonwealth is remarkably constituted.  The State is inhabited principally by negroes; and the remaining minority may be divided into two classes,—­whites who are dependent upon negroes for a subsistence, and whites whose chief distinction in life and great consolation is that they are not negroes.  The former and much the smaller class possess all the wealth, all the cultivation, and all the political power, which they are enabled to retain by an ingenious and systematic use of the prejudices and passions of the latter.  They are reputed to have much earnestness of conviction, and claim an unusual amount of gallantry and courage for their soldiers; though it is noticeable that their principal exploits in our time have been the seizure of friendless colored sailors, and selling them into slavery,—­the achievement of that knight of the bludgeon, the representative whose noble deed his constituents could hardly admire enough, but the better part of whose valor was the discretion that preferred to encounter his antagonist sitting and incapable of resistance,—­and lastly, that heroic and bloodless victory at Fort Sumter, where imperishable glory was won by the ten thousand who conquered the seventy.  They seem now to be united, and substantially unanimous.  What elements a little adversity would develop in them, time must determine.  Whether there is any reserve of patriotism and fidelity, overawed and silenced now, but which will come forth to serve as the nucleus of reconstruction when it can find protection and security, or whether we must wait for a new generation to grow up, remains to be tried.  Their leaders are subtle reasoners, and it has been shrewdly observed of them that “they never shrink from following their logic to its consequences because the conclusion is immoral.”  Perhaps they will find no more difficulty in accepting the arguments we shall address to them because the conclusion is a little