A fifth reason why the South will not dissolve, is her weakness.  It is a remarkable fact, that in modern times, and in the Christian world, all slaveholding countries have been united with countries that are free.  Thus, the West Indian and Mexican and South American slaveholding colonies were united to England, France, Spain, Portugal, and other states of Europe.  If England (before her Emancipation Act) and the others had at any time withdrawn the protection of their power from their colonies, slavery would have been extinguished almost simultaneously with the knowledge of the fact.  In the West Indies there could have been no doubt of this, from the disparity in numbers between the whites and the slaves, from the multiplied attempts made from time to time by the latter to vindicate their rights by insurrection, and from the fact, that all their insurrections had to be suppressed by the force of the mother country.  As soon as Mexico and the South American colonies dissolved their connexion with Spain, slavery was abolished in every one of them.  This may, I know, be attributed to the necessity imposed on these states, by the wars in which they engaged to establish their independence.  However this may be—­the fact still remains.  The free states of this Union are to the slave, so far as the maintenance of slavery is concerned, substantially, in the relation of the European states to their slaveholding colonies.  Slavery, in all probability, could not be maintained by the South disjoined from the North, a single year.  So far from there existing any reason for making the South an exception, in this particular, to other slave countries, there are circumstances in her condition that seem to make her dependence more complete.  Two of them are, the superior intelligence of her slaves on the subject of human rights, and the geographical connexion of the slave region in the United States.  In the West Indies, in Mexico and South America the great body of the slaves were far below the slaves of this country in their intellectual and moral condition—­and, in the former, their power to act in concert was weakened by the insular fragments into which they were divided.

Again, the depopulation of the South of large numbers of its white inhabitants, from the cause mentioned under the fourth head, would, it is apprehended, bring the two classes to something like a numerical equality.  Now, consider the present state of the moral sentiment of the Christianized and commercial world in relation to slavery; add to it the impulse that this sentiment, acknowledged by the South already to be wholly opposed to her, would naturally acquire by an act of separation on her part, with a single view to the perpetuation of slavery; bring this sentiment in all its accumulation and intensity to act upon a nation where one half are enslavers, the other the enslaved—­and what must be the effect?  From the nature of mind; from the laws of moral influence, (which are as sure