nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our
better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its
legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them
the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher
political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than
chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present
limits.

We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than
anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved
both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in
public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a
politician. That he has not had more will be no objection to him in the
eyes of those who have seen the administration of the experienced
public functionary whose term of office is just drawing to a close. He
represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its
advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal
with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser
to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but
in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party,
because they are the only one based on an enduring principle, the only
one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with
to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to
doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces
them.

The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like
those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon
with its glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an
anachronism of summer, the relic of a by-gone world where such monsters
swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work
against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old,
fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous
devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant
sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no
trace, but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed
boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in
the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and
believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually
before it. "All the earth cries ou