wisely and profitably directed. He
has been naturally reluctant to employ force, but has overlooked the
difference between indecision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of
all experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the need of force
in the end, and that forcible measures applied too late may be made to
seem violent ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with the
sufferers by their own misdoing. The feeling of the country has been
unmistakably expressed in regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely
because he showed prudence and courage, but because he was the first
man holding a position of trust who did his duty to the nation. Public
sentiment unmistakably demands that, in the case of Anarchy _vs._
America, the cause of the defendant shall not be suffered to go by
default. The proceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime
initiative of our own Revolution with a Declaration of Independence
that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and
substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of
happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own
negro,--these proceedings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for
the danger that the men engaged in them may so far commit themselves as
to find the inconsistency of a return to prudence too galling, and to
prefer the safety of their pride to that of their country.

[Illustration: _Major Anderson_]

It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often repeated that the
discontent of South Carolina is not one to be allayed by any
concessions which the Free States can make with dignity or even safety.
It is something more radical and of longer standing than distrust of
the motives or probable policy of the Republican party. It is neither
more nor less than a disbelief in the very principles on which our
government is founded. So long as they practically retained the
government of the country, and could use its power and patronage to
their own advantage, the plotters were willing to wait; but the moment
they lost that control, by the breaking up of the Democratic party, and
saw that their chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they declared
openly the principles on which they have all along been secretly
acting. Denying the constitutionality of special protection to any
other species of property or branch of industry, and in 1832
threatening to break up the Union unless their theory of the
Constitution in th