e Americans
employed the immense sums which we expend to avert or to sustain war, in
opening schools, and in giving to all their citizens, poor or rich, that
education and that instruction which form the moral greatness and the
true riches of the people. Their foreign policy was comprised in this
maxim: 'Never to mingle in the quarrels of Europe on the sole condition
that Europe will not interfere with their affairs, and will respect the
liberty of the seas.' Thanks to these wise principles, which Washington
left them in his immortal testament, the United States have enjoyed, for
eighty years, a peace which has only been disturbed by Europe when, in
1812, they were forced to resist England and sustain the rights of
neutrals. We must count by hundreds of millions those sums that we have
used during the last seventy years in the upholding our liberty in
Europe; these hundreds of millions the United States have employed in
improvements of every description. Here is the secret of their
prodigious fortune; it is their perfect independence which makes their
prosperity.

Let us now suppose the separation finally accomplished, and that the new
confederation comprises all the Slave States; the North has at once lost
both its power and the foundations of that power. The Republic has
received a mortal blow. There are in America two nations, side by side,
two jealous rivals who are always on the point of attacking each other.
Peace will not remove their antipathies; it will not efface the memory
of the past greatness of the Union now destroyed; the victorious South
will, without doubt, be quite as friendly toward slavery, and as fond of
domination as ever. The enemies of slavery, now masters of their own
policy, will certainly not be soothed by the separation. What will the
Southern confederacy be to the North! It will be a foreign power
established in America, with a frontier of one thousand five hundred
miles, unprotected on every side, and consequently continually
threatening or menaced. This power, hostile, because of its vicinity
alone, and still more so by its institutions, will possess a very
considerable portion of the New World; it will have half the coasts of
the Union; it will command the Gulf of Mexico, an inland sea one third
the size of the Mediterranean; it will be the mistress of the mouths of
the Mississippi, and can ruin at its pleasure the inhabitants of the
West. The fragments of the old Union will have to be al