The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture.  The descendants of the men “daily exercised in tyranny,” the “petty tyrants” as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated.  It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,—­so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.

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.”