What is the present issue?  It is a contest, when reduced to its ultimate terms, between free labor and slavery.  It is very true that this secession was planned before slavery considered itself aggrieved, before abolitionism became a word of war.  But the antipathy between the slaveholder and the payer or receiver of wages was none the less radical.  The systems were just as hostile.  We admit that the South can make out its title of legitimacy.  It has a slave population it must take care of and is bound to take care of till somebody can tell what better to do with it.  It can show a refined condition of its highest society, which contrasts not unfavorably with the tawdry display and vulgar ostentation of the nouveaux riches whom sudden success in trade or invention has made conspicuous at the North.  There is a fascination about the Southern life and character which charms those who do not look at it too closely into ardent championship.  Even Mr. Russell, so long as he looked into white faces in South Carolina, was fascinated, and only when he came to look into black faces along the Mississippi found the disenchantment.  The decisive difference is, that the North is purposing to settle and possess this land according to the law of right, and the South according to the law of might.

We say, therefore, that the issue of the contest need not be doubtful.  The events of it may be very uncertain, but, from the parallel we have sketched, we think we can indicate the four chief causes of the Scottish failure as existing in the present crisis.

DISSENSIONS AMONG THE REBELS.  These of course are hid from us by the veil of smoke that rises above Bull Run.  But as between the party of advance and the party of defence, between the would-be spoilers of New York bank-vaults and Philadelphia mint-coffers, and the more prudent who desire “to be let alone,” there is already an issue created.  There are State jealousies, and that impatience of control which is inherent in the Southern mind, as it was in that of the Highland chieftains.  There will be, as events move on, the same feud developed between the Palmetto of Carolina and the Pride-of-China of the Georgian, as then burned between Glen-Garry of that ilk and Vich Ian Vohr.  There are rivalries of interest quite as fierce as those which roused the anti-tariff furor of Mr. Calhoun.  Much as Great Britain may covet the cotton of South Carolina, she will not be disposed to encourage Louisiana to a competition in sugar with her own Jamaica.  Virginia will hardly brook the opening of a rival Dahomey which shall cheapen into unprofitableness her rearing of slaves.  While fighting is to be done, these questions are in abeyance; but so soon as men come to ask what they are fighting for, they revive.  There is selfishness inherent in the very idea of secession.