The utter recklessness concerning life and property with which the splendid intellect, under the lead of the ungovernable passions of this man, was plunging the nation into a civil war of which no one could foresee the end, was the thought uppermost.  Certainly, the abstract manliness of asserting rights supposed to be infringed it was in itself impossible not to respect.  But the man seemed to love war for its own sake, as pugnacious schoolboys love sham-fights, with a sort of glee in the smell of the smoke of battle.  The judicial calmness of statesmanship had entirely disappeared in the violence of sectional passion.  Perhaps he might be capable of ruining his country from pure love of turbulence and power, could he but find a pretext of force sufficient to blind first himself and then others.  Yet Robert Toombs, in the Senate Chamber, takes little children in his arms, and is one of the kindest of the noblemen of Nature in the sphere of his unpolitical sympathies.  The reader who is familiar with Mr. Toombs’s speeches will need no assurance that he spoke frankly.[A]

[Footnote A:  Ten days later, in the Senate, with a face full of the combined erubescence of revolutionary enthusiasm and unstatesmanlike anger, Mr. Toombs closed a speech to the Northern Senators in the following amazing words, (Congressional Globe, 1860-61, p. 271,) which justify, it will be seen, every syllable of the report of the conversation upon the same points:—­

“You will not regard confederate obligations; you will not regard constitutional obligations; you will not regard your oaths.  What am I to do?  Am I a freeman?  Is my State, a free State, to lie down and submit because political fossils raise the cry of ‘The Glorious Union’?  Too long already have we listened to this delusive song.  We are freemen.  We have rights:  I have stated them.  We have wrongs:  I have recounted them.  I have demonstrated that the party now coming into power has declared us outlaws, and is determined to exclude four thousand millions of our property from the common territories,—­that it has declared us under the ban of the empire and out of the protection of the laws of the United States, everywhere.  They have refused to protect us from invasion and insurrection by the Federal power, and the Constitution denies to us in the Union the right either to raise fleets or armies for our own defence.  All these charges I have proven by the record, and I put them before the civilized world, and demand the judgment of to-day, of to-morrow, of distant ages, and of Heaven itself, upon these causes.  I am content, whatever it be, to peril all in so noble, so holy a cause.  We have appealed time and time again for these constitutional rights.  You have refused them.  We appeal again.  Restore us these rights as we had them, as your court adjudges them to be, just as all our people have said they are, redress these flagrant wrongs, seen of all men, and it will restore fraternity and peace and unity to all of us.  Refuse them, and what then?  We shall then ask you to ‘let us depart in peace.’  Refuse that, and you present us war.  We accept it; and inscribing upon our banners the glorious words, ‘Liberty and Equality,’ we will trust to the blood of the brave and the God of battles for security and tranquillity.”