At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden harvest of crime.  Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union.  That the principle which underlay these acts of fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government to be its Messiah to the listening world.  As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened that of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam.  Then spake Mr.  “Vice-President” Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the theory of the new social order.  He first lifted a degraded barbarism to the dignity of a philosophic system.  He first proclaimed the gospel of eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for the western Palestine.  Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!  The corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave States, we read in the “Richmond Examiner”:  “The establishment of the Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of the mistaken civilization of the age.  For ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination, and Government.”

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in dividing the country.  Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery.  Add to this the official statement made in 1862, that “there is not one regiment or battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived from the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union”; throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens’s explicit declaration in the speech referred to, and we will consider the evidence closed for the present on this count of the indictment.