Southrons that used to insult us semiannually by insisting that we should part with Cuba, though we should as soon have thought of selling Cadiz.  But it was the American Government, which spoke in the name of the whole American nation, that made the demand for Cuba, and which protected the pirates.  Had you made war on us to obtain possession of Cuba, as you would have done but for the occurrence of your civil troubles, that war would have been waged by the United States, and not by the South and by the Democratic party.  It would have been the work of you all, of Republicans as well as Democrats, of Yankees as well as Southrons, of Abolitionists as well as Slaveholders.  There would have come soldiers from your Southern States, to tear from the Spanish monarchy its most valuable foreign possession; but whence would have come the men who would have manned your fleets, that would have acted with your armies, protecting their landing, and thus alone making Cuba’s conquest possible?  They would have been Northern men, New-Englanders and New-Yorkers, perhaps descendants of some of the very men who helped to conquer a portion of the island a century ago.  It was American strength that we feared, not the strength of the North or that of the South, for neither of which do we care.  Who would have furnished the capital to pay the expenses of the war?  Who but the rich men of the North?  Money is the sinew of all war, foreign and civil, and not a little of that Northern capital which we have seen so lavishly poured out in aid of the Union would have been subscribed in aid of a project to bring the curse of disunion upon our country.  You know this to be the fact, and we challenge you as truthful men to deny it, that for many years it has been a favorite idea with some of your statesmen, and not of leaders of the Democratic party only, to stave off the troubles that were rapidly growing out of the slavery question, by having recourse to a ‘distraction’ based on the acquisition of Cuba.  You know, or ought to know, that the very man who is now at the head of the Southern Confederacy was advised, at the North, in 1853, to pursue such a course with regard to Cuba, he being then the most influential member of the Pierce administration, as should ‘distract’ American attention from slavery as a local matter; and that he thought this Northern advice good, and would have given the administration’s support to the project it involved, and probably with success, and to our great loss and disgrace, when a new turn was given to your strange politics by the movement in behalf of the repeal of the Missouri compromise, a movement that has brought safety to us, and loss and disgrace upon yourselves.  We admit that your cause is the cause of law, of order, and of constitutional freedom; but why should we desire the triumph of the cause of law, of order, and of constitutional freedom in the United States, when that triumph would be but preliminary to a triumph over our own country?