Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,—­our neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands of miles,—­but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce, intolerant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual standing army; hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile nation on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development?  Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor, multiplied by the breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of the slave-trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses, to fit out navies.  The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which professed to grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and migrating warriors.  The Southern people, fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which cannot remain stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of labor and of land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes.  Already, even, the insolence of their language to the people of the North is a close imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics affected toward all the nations of Europe.  What the “Christian dogs” were to the followers of Mahomet, the “accursed Yankees,” the “Northern mud-sills” are to the followers of the Southern Moloch.  The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent.  In all branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond them.  The schools of mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian teachers.  The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the students of the starry firmament.  The sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry, could show nothing fairer than the court which copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of Granada.  Yet this was the power which Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had to break like a potter’s vessel; these were the people whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries.

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit of Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will be to you what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms.  Prepare for the possible fate of Christian Spain; for a slave-market in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of Presidents and their exemplary families.  Remember the ages of border warfare between England and Scotland,