There can be no doubt that the ultimatum of the South is secession or death.  We of the North can not contemplate such a picture with calmness, and therefore evade it as amiably as we can.  We say, it stands to reason that very few men will burn their own homes and crops, yet every mail tells us of tremendous suicidal sacrifices of this description.  The ruin and misery which the South is preparing for itself in every way is incalculable and incredible, and yet there is no diminution of desperation.  The prosperity which made a mock of honest poverty is now, as by the retributive judgment of God, sinking itself into penury, and the planter who spoke of the Northern serf as a creature just one remove above the brute, is himself learning by bitter experience to be a mud-sill.  Verily the cause of the poor and lowly is being avenged.  Yet with all this there is no hint or hope of compromise; repeated defeats are, so far, of little avail.  The Northern Doughfaces tell us over and over again, that if we will ‘only leave the slave question untouched,’ all will yet be right.  ’Only spare them the negro, and they, seeing that we do not intend to interfere with their rights, will eventually settle down into the Union.’  But what is there to guarantee this assertion?  What proof have we that the South can be in this manner conciliated?  None—­positively none.

There is nothing which the Southern press, and, so far as we can learn, the Southern people, have so consistently and thoroughly disavowed since the war began, as the assertion that a restoration of the Union may be effected on the basis of undisturbed slavery.  They have ridiculed the Democrats of the North with as great contempt and as bitter sarcasm as were ever awarded of old to Abolitionists, for continually urging this worn-out folly; for now that the mask is finally thrown off, they make no secret of their scorn for their old tools and dupes.  Slavery is no longer the primary object; they are quite willing to give up slavery if the growing prosperity of the South should require it; their emissaries abroad in every salon have been vowing that manumission of their slaves would soon follow recognition; and it was their rage at failure after such wretched abasement and unprincipled inconsistency which, very naturally, provoked the present ire of the South against England and France.  They, the proud, chivalrous Southrons, who had daringly rushed to battle as slave lords, after eating abundant dirt as prospective Abolitionists, after promising any thing and every thing for a recognition, received the cold shoulder.  No wonder that ill-will to England is openly avowed by the Richmond press as one of the reasons for burning the cotton as the Northern armies advance.