“But we might have permitted secession.”  No, we could not.  It was clearly impracticable.  “But why not?” Because that would have been to surrender the whole under the guise of giving up half.  Such a concession could have meant to the people of the rebellious States, and, in the existing state of national belief, could have meant to our very selves, nothing other than this:—­“We submit; do what you will; we are shopkeepers and cowards; we must have your trade; and besides, though expert in the use of yardsticks, we have not the nerve for handling guns.”  From that moment we should have lost all authority on this continent, and all respect on the other.

The English papers have blamed us for fighting; but had we failed to fight, not one of these censuring mouths but would have hissed at us like an adder with contempt Nay, we ourselves should, as it were, soon have lost the musical speech and high carriage of men, and fallen to a proneness and a hissing, degraded in our own eyes even more than in those of our neighbors.  Of course, from this state we should have risen; but it would have been to see the redness of war on our own fields and its flames wrapping our own households.  We should have risen, but through a contest to which this war, gigantic though it be, is but a quarrel of school-boys.

By sheer necessity we began to fight; by the same we must fight It out.  Compromise is, in the nature of the case, impossible.  It can mean only surrender.  Had there been an inch more of ground for us to yield without total submission, the war would have been, for the present, staved off.  We turned to bay only when driven back to the vital principle of our polity and the vital facts of our socialization.

Politically, what was the immediate grievance of the South?  Simply that Northern freemen went to the polls as freemen; simply that they there expressed, under constitutional forms, their lawful preference.  How can we compromise here, even to the breadth of a hair?  How compromise without stipulating that all Northern electors shall henceforth go to the polls in charge of an armed police, and there deposit such ballot as the slave-masters of the Secession States shall direct?

Again, in our social state what is it that gives umbrage to our antagonists?  They have answered the question for us; they have stated it repeatedly in the plainest English.  It is simply the fact that we are free States; that we have, and honor, free labor; that we have schools for the people; that we teach the duty of each to all and of all to each; that we respect the human principle, the spiritual possibility, in man; in fine, that ours is a human socialization, whose fundamental principles are the venerableness of man’s nature and the superiority of reason and right to any individual will.  So far as we are base bargainers and unbelievers, they can tolerate us, even though they despise; just where our praise begins, begin their detestation and animosity.