If the American people hesitate, it is not for want of warning or advices.  The telegraph has been swift enough to announce our disasters.  The journals have not suppressed the extent of the calamity.  Neither was there any want of argument or of experience.  If the war brought any surprise to the North, it was not the fault of sentinels on the watch-towers, who had furnished full details of the designs, the muster, and the means of the enemy.  Neither was anything concealed of the theory or practice of slavery.  To what purpose make more big books of these statistics?  There are already mountains of facts, if any one wants them.  But people do not want them.  They bring their opinions into the world.  If they have a comatose tendency in the brain, they are pro-slavery while they live; if of a nervous sanguineous temperament, they are abolitionists.  Then interests were never persuaded.  Can you convince the shoe interest, or the iron interest, or the cotton interest, by reading passages from Milton or Montesquieu?  You wish to satisfy people that slavery is bad economy.  Why, the “Edinburgh Review” pounded on that string, and made out its case forty years ago.  A democratic statesman said to me, long since, that, if he owned the State of Kentucky, he would manumit all the slaves, and be a gainer by the transaction.  Is this new?  No, everybody knows it.  As a general economy it is admitted.  But there is no one owner of the State, but a good many small owners.  One man owns land and slaves; another owns slaves only.  Here is a woman who has no other property,—­like a lady in Charleston I knew of, who owned fifteen chimney-sweeps and rode in her carriage.  It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of these to make any change, and they are fretful and talkative, and all their friends are; and those less interested are inert, and, from want of thought, averse to innovation.  It is like free trade, certainly the interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many.  Banknotes rob the public, but are such a daily convenience that we silence our scruples, and make believe they are gold.  So imposts are the cheap and right taxation; but by the dislike of people to pay out a direct tax, governments are forced to render life costly by making them pay twice as much, hidden in the price of tea and sugar.

In this national crisis, it is not argument that we want, but that rare courage which dares commit itself to a principle, believing that Nature is its ally, and will create the instruments it requires, and more than make good any petty and injurious profit which it may disturb.  There never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set down in any history.  We want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality, namely, to considerations