f 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.

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of
fracture, this pre