I replied, “They say that we have held them up to universal execration; that we have quoted, with readiness, the testimony of foreign nations against them,—­of nations who know nothing of domestic slavery like ours, mixed up with the qualifying influences of our own civilization; that our imaginative literature has made them odious, associating cruelty and vulgarity with the relation of slave-holding; that we have labored to cripple their Institution, hoping to destroy it; that we have striven to save the District of Columbia from their system as from corruption; that a thousand millions of dollars of their property we have treated as contraband, and have made it perilous for them to recover it; that we have lain in wait and molested them in their transit through our borders, with their servants, to embark for sea.  We dispute their right to go with their servants into territories jointly acquired, and belonging by constitutional right equally to them as to ourselves.  This, they say, has not been a just and sincere demand for an equitable division of territory in view of the naturally conflicting interests of slave labor and free, but rather a vindictive determination to hem in the slave-holder, to force the scorpion into fires where he shall die of his own sting, or,—­to borrow the metaphor, with the language, of a present Senator from Massachusetts,—­where the ’poisoned rat shall die in his own hole.’

“Two confederacies or one, our prospect is fearful if we continue to feel and act toward each other after this temper, and to cherish our respective grievances.”

“There is another side to all this,” said Mr. North.  “I ascribe the excitement at the South to the loss on their part of political power, or to a grasping spirit which breaks compromises, and which requires that the national legislation be always shaped in its favor.”

“But,” said I, “if we can trust the convictions of just men, in private life, at the South,—­men removed from all suspicion as to the purity of their motives,—­it is certain that our Northern feelings toward slave-holders, and the expressions of those feelings in ways which have been applauded among us for many years, are the real causes of the irritation and exasperation which have brought us to the present brink.

“Now, as these two sections must continue to exist, side by side, they will go on to repel each other until either slavery ceases, or a change of feeling takes place in the non-slaveholding section.  Secession and permanent division will not cure the trouble, but will increase it.  Moreover, the contrariety of feeling between people in the non-slaveholding States, made intense by the departure of the Southern section, may inaugurate hostilities among ourselves more fearful than those which drive away the Southern people.

“Perhaps we are to be two nations.  I cannot but regard this as the greatest calamity which will have happened to the cause of human improvement.  Nor do I see how it will help Northern philanthropy, nor the negro; but it may be greatly for his injury.  The truth is, we must live together for self-defence against each other, if from no other consideration.  Israel began its downfall in secession, which was compelled by Rehoboam.