with its pretty twin-brother about Cavaliers and Roundheads, would seem to have been hatched from the same egg and in the same mare’s-nest.  If we should take the statements of Dr. Cullen and Mr. Smith O’Brien for our premises, instead of the manifest facts of the case, our conclusion in regard to Ireland would be an anachronism which no Englishman would allow to be within half a century of the actual condition of things.  And yet could the Irish revolutionists of thirteen years ago have had the advantage of a ministry like that of Mr. Buchanan,—­had every Irish officer and soldier been false to his honor and his allegiance,—­had Ireland been supplied and England stripped of arms and munitions of war by the connivance of the Government,—­the riot of 1848 might have become a rebellion as formidable as our own in everything but territorial proportions.  Equally untrue is the theory that our Tariff is the moving cause of Southern discontent.  Louisiana certainly would hardly urge this as the reason of her secession; and if the Rebel States could succeed in establishing their independence, they would find more difficulty in raising a national revenue by direct taxes than the North, and would be driven probably to a tariff more stringent than that of the present United States.  If we are to generalize at all, it must be on broader and safer grounds.  Prejudices and class-interests may occasion temporary disturbances in the current of human affairs, but they do not permanently change the course of the channel.  That is governed by natural and lasting causes, and commerce, in spite of Southern Commercial Conventions, will no more flow up-hill than water.  It is possible, we will not say probable, that our present difficulties may result to the advantage both of England and America:  to England, by giving her a real hold upon India as the source of her cotton-supply, and to America by making the North the best customer for the staple of the South.

We believe the immediate cause of the Southern Rebellion to be something far deeper than any social prejudice or political theory on the part of slaveholders, or any general apprehension of danger to their peculiar property.  That cause is a moral one, and is to be found in the recklessness, the conceit, the sophistry, the selfishness, which are necessarily engendered by Slavery itself.  A generation of men educated to justify a crime against the Law of Nature because it is profitable, will hardly be restrained long by any merely political obligation, when they have been persuaded to see their advantage in the breach of it.  Why not, then, at once lay the axe to the root of the mischief?  Why did not England attack Irish Catholicism in 1848?  Why does not Louis Napoleon settle the Papal Question with a stroke of his pen?  Because the action of a constitutional government is limited by constitutional obligations.  Because every government, even if despotic, must be guided by policy rather than abstract right or reason.