for the protection of their property.  But here are four billions of the property of the South which you propose to outlaw from the common Territories.  You say to us, by your elected President, by your House of Representatives, by your Senate, by your Supreme Court, in short, by every means through which one party can speak to another, that these four billions of property, representing the toil of the head and hand of the South for the last two hundred years, shall not be respected in the Territories as your property is respected there.  And this property, too, is property which you tax and which you allow to be represented; but yet you will not protect it.  How can we remain?  We should be happy to remain, if you would treat us as equals; but you tax us, and will not protect us.  We will resist.  D—­n it,”—­this and other striking expressions are precisely Mr. Toombs’s language,—­“we will meet you on the border with the bayonet.  Society cannot be kept together, unless men will keep their compacts.”

This was said without the intonation of fierceness or malignity, but with great decision and the vigor of high spirit.

It was taking, of course, with considerable emphasis, a side in a famous Constitutional question, familiar to all readers of American Congressional Debates, once supported by Mr. Calhoun, and rather strangely, too, with that philosophical leader, confusing the absurdly asserted State right of seceding at will with the undoubted right, when there exists no peaceful remedy, of seceding from intolerable oppression:  an entire position which Mr. Webster especially, and subsequent statesmen, in arguments elucidating the nature and powers of the General Government, to say nothing of the respect due to a moral sentiment concerning slavery, which, permeating more than a majority of the people, has the force, when properly expressed, wherever the Constitution has jurisdiction, of supreme law, are thought by most men, once and forever, to have satisfactorily answered.  It was a complaint, certainly, which the South had had ever since the Constitution was formed, and which could with no plausibility be brought forward as a justification of war, while there existed a Constitutional tribunal for adjusting difficulties of Constitutional interpretation.  Yet, as it was almost universally asserted, of course, by the Northern partisan presses, and by Northern Congressmen, that the Rebellion was utterly causeless, and as the writer was therefore exceedingly anxious to obtain, concerning their grievances, the latest opinions of the Southern leaders, as stated by themselves, he ventured to propose, in a pause of Mr. Toombs’s somewhat rapid rhetoric, a question which, at that moment, seemed of central importance to the candid philosophical inquirer into the moving forces of the times:—­

“Are we, then, Sir, to consider Mr. Calhoun’s old complaint—­the non-recognition of slave-property under the Federal Constitution—­as constituting now the chief grievance of the South?”