party should have acquired sufficient strength, to elect a president with Northern views.  Before, however, this event occurred, the war in Kansas rang a prophetic peal of warning through the land; and the struggle there begun between New England emigrants bent on founding a free state, and Missouri border ruffians determined to make the new territory a slaveholding addition to the South, might have roused the whole North and West to the imminence of the peril, by which the safety of the Union was threatened.

But neither the struggle in Kansas, nor the strange and piteous episode which grew out of it, of John Brown’s attempt to excite an insurrection in Virginia, and his execution by the government of that State, did more than startle the North with a nine days’ wonder out of its apathetic indifference.  The Republican party, it is true, gained adherents, and acquired strength by degrees; and Mr. Buchanan’s term of office approaching its expiration, it became apparent that the Democratic party was about to lose its supremacy, and the slaveholders their dominion; and no sooner was this evident than the latter threw off the mask, and renounced their allegiance to the Union.  In a day—­in an hour almost—­those stood face to face as mortal enemies who were citizens of the same country, subjects of the same government, children of the same soil; and the North, incredulous and amazed, found itself suddenly summoned to retrieve its lost power and influence, and assert the dignity of the insulted Union against the rebellious attempt of the South to overthrow it.

But it was late for them to take that task in hand.  For years the conduct of the government of the United States had been becoming a more desperate and degraded jobbery, one from which day by day the Northern gentlemen of intelligence, influence, and education withdrew themselves in greater disgust, devoting their energies to schemes of mere personal advantage, and leaving the commonweal with selfish and contemptuous indifference to the guidance of any hands less nice and less busy than their own.

Nor would the Southern planters—­a prouder and more aristocratic race than the Northern merchants—­have relished the companionship of their fellow-politicians more than the latter, but their personal interests were at stake, and immediately concerned in their maintaining their predominant influence over the government; and while the Boston men wrote and talked transcendentalism, and became the most accomplished of aestetische cotton spinners and railroad speculators, and made the shoes and cow-hides of the Southerners, the latter made their laws; (I believe New Jersey is really the great cow-hide factory); and the New York men, owners of the fastest horses and finest houses in the land, having made a sort of Brummagem Paris of their city, were the bankers and brokers of the Southerners, while the latter were their legislators.

The grip the slaveholders had fastened on the helm of the State had been tightening for nearly half a century, till the government of the nation had become literally theirs, and the idea of their relinquishing it was one which the North did not contemplate, and they would not tolerate.