For three-quarters of a century we have been melting our several destinies in one common crucible, to mould a new and mighty empire such as the world has never seen.  Our partners cannot expect to be allowed to break the crucible or the mould, or to carry away the once separate portions now flowing in a single incandescent flood.  We cannot sell and they cannot buy our past.  Our nation has pledged itself to unity by the whole course of its united action.  There is one debt alone that all the cotton-fields of the South could never pay:  it is the price of our voluntary humiliation for the sake of keeping peace with the slaveholders.  We may be robbed of our inalienable nationality, if treason is strong enough, but we are trustees of the life of three generations for the benefit of all that are yet to be.  We cannot sell.  We dare not break the entail of freedom and disinherit the first-born of half a continent.

When the Plebeians seceded to the Mons Sacer, some five hundred years before the Christian era, the Consul Menenius Agrippa brought them back by his well-known fable of the Belly and the Members.  Perhaps it would be too much to expect to call back our seceders with a fable which they will hardly have the opportunity of reading in the present condition of the postal service, but the state of the case may be put with a certain degree of truth in this of

THE FRONT-TEETH AND THE GRINDERS.

Once on a time a mutiny arose among the teeth of a worthy man, in good health and blessed with a sound constitution, commonly known as Uncle Samuel.  The cutting-teeth, or incisors, and the eye-teeth, or canines, though not nearly so many, all counted, nor so large, nor so strong as the grinders, and by no means so white, but, on the contrary, very much discolored, began to find fault with the grinders as not good enough company for them.  The eye-teeth, being very sharp and fitted for seizing and tearing, and standing out taller than the rest, claimed to lead them.  Presently, one of them complained that it ached very badly, and then another and another.  Very soon the cutting-teeth, which pretended they were supplied by the same nerve, and were proud of it, began to ache also.  They all agreed that it was the fault of the grinders.

About this time, Uncle Samuel, having used his old tooth-brush (which was never a good one, having no stiffness in the bristles) for four years, took a new one, recommended to him by a great number of people as a homely, but useful article.  Thereupon all the front-teeth, one after another, declared that Uncle Samuel meant to scour them white, which was a thing they would never submit to, though the whole civilized world was calling on them to do so.  So they all insisted on getting out of the sockets in which they had grown and stood for so many years.  But the wisdom-teeth spoke up for the others and said,—­