they provide the means of independence.  If they are not freeholders, they earn wages; these wages accumulate, are turned into capital, into new freeholds, and small capitalists are created.  Such is the case, and such the course of things, among the industrious and frugal.  And what can these people think when so respectable and worthy a gentleman as the member from Louisiana undertakes to prove that the absolute ignorance and the abject slavery of the South are more in conformity with the high purposes and destiny of immortal, rational, human beings, than the educated, the independent free labor of the North?

There is a more tangible and irritating cause of grievance at the North.  Free blacks are constantly employed in the vessels of the North, generally as cooks or stewards.  When the vessel arrives at a southern port, these free colored men are taken on shore, by the police or municipal authority, imprisoned, and kept in prison till the vessel is again ready to sail.  This is not only irritating, but exceedingly unjustifiable and oppressive.  Mr. Hoar’s mission, some time ago to South Carolina, was a well-intended effort to remove this cause of complaint.  The North thinks such imprisonments illegal and unconstitutional; and as the cases occur constantly and frequently they regard it as a grievance.

Now, sir, so far as any of these grievances have their foundation in matters of law, they can be redressed, and ought to be redressed; and so far as they have their foundation in matters of opinion, in sentiment, in mutual crimination and recrimination, all that we can do is to endeavor to allay the agitation, and cultivate a better feeling and more fraternal sentiments between the South and the North.

Mr. President, I should much prefer to have heard from every member on this floor declarations of opinion that this Union could never be dissolved, than the declaration of opinion by anybody, that in any case, under the pressure of any circumstances, such a dissolution was possible.  I hear with distress and anguish the word “secession,” especially when it falls from the lips of those who are patriotic, and known to the country, and known all over the world for their political services.  Secession!  Peaceable secession!  Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle.  The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion!  The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface!  Who is so foolish—­I beg everybody’s pardon—­as to expect to see any such thing?  Sir, he who sees these States, now revolving in harmony around a common centre, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe.  There can be no such thing as a peaceable secession.  Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility.  Is the great