“So far, I have allowed the sin.  Yet, sin or not, in this country the estate of the slave is unalterable.  Segregately, the institution is their protection.  For though there is no record of the contact of superior and inferior races on a basis of equality, where the inferior did not absorb the superior, yet, if every slave were set free to-day, imbruted through generations, it could not be on a basis of equality that we should meet, and they would be as inevitably sunk and lost as the detritus that a river washes into the sea.  If the black stay here, it must be as a menial.  In his own latitudes, where, after the third generation, the white man ceases to exist, he is the stronger; there the black man is king:  let him betake himself to his realm.  Abolition is impracticable, colonization feasible; on either is gunpowder wasted:  one cannot explode a lie by the blast.

“But saying the worst of our incubus that can be said, could all its possible accumulation of wrong and woe exceed that of four years of such a war as this?  Think a moment of what this land was, what a great beacon and celestial city across the waves to the fugitives from tyranny; think of our powerful pride in eastern seas, in western ports, when each ship’s armament carried with it the broadside of so many sovereign States, when each citizen felt his own hand nerved with a people’s strength, when no young man woke in the morning without the perpetual aurora of high hopes before him, when peace and plenty were all about us,—­and then think of misery at every hearth, of civilization thrust back a century, of the prestige of freedom lost among the nations, of the way paved for despots.  And how needlessly!

“They taunted us, us the source of all their wealth, with the pauper’s deserting the poor-house; we put it to proof; when, lo! with a hue and cry, the blood-hounds are upon us, the very dogs of war.  So needless a war!  For has it not been a fundamental principle that every people has a right to govern itself?  We chose to exercise that right.  Was it worth the while to refuse it?  Exhausted, drained, dispeopled, they may chain a vassal province to their throne; but, woe be to them, upon that conquering day, their glory has departed from them!  The first Revolution was but the prologue to this:  that was sealed in blood; in this might have been demonstrated the progress made under eighty years of freedom, by a peaceful separation.  It is the Flight of the Tartar Tribe anew, and the whole barbarous Northern nation pours its hordes after, hangs on the flank, harasses, impedes, slaughters,—­but we reach the shadow of the Great Wall at last.  If we had not the right to leave the league, how had we the right to enter?  If we had not the right to leave, they also had not the right to withhold us.  Yet, when we entered, resigning much, receiving much, retaining more, we were each a unit, a power, a commonwealth, a nation, or, as we chose to term it, a State,—­as