rious evolutions
of Art, Science, Literature and Religion, will depend upon the amicable
adjustment, the co-ordination, the indissoluble compact between these
two social systems, now apparently rearing their hostile fronts in the
Northern and Southern sections of this country.

The only "irrepressible conflict" is between pro-slavery and
anti-slavery opinion: Here indeed collision may be inconceivably
disastrous, and fanaticism may thrust her sickle into the harvest of
death. The pro-slavery sentiment is unconquerable. It will be more and
more suspicious of encroachment and jealous of its rights. It will
submit to no restriction, and scouts the possibility of any "ultimate
extinction." Nothing will satisfy us but a radical change of opinion, or
at least of political action on the subject of slavery throughout the
Northern States. The relation of master and slave must be recognized as
right and just, as national and perpetual. The Constitution must be
construed in the spirit of its founders, as an instrument to protect the
minority from the domination of an insolent majority. The slavery
question must be eliminated forever from the political issues of the
day. No party which contemplates the restriction of our system and its
ultimate extinction can be tolerated for a moment. In assuming this bold
attitude we simply assert our obvious rights and discharge our
inevitable duty.

Now the Northern mind is equally determined and defiant. It has
literally gone mad in its hostility to our institutions. The most
conservative of the Republican party look forward complacently to the
restriction and ultimate extinction of slavery, in other words, to the
Africanization of the South and our national destruction. We will see to
it that they precipitate no such calamity upon us, and we warn them to
look carefully to their own fate. When a Northern Confederacy can no
longer like a vampire suck the blood of the sleeping and compliant
South; when agrarianism and atheism and fanaticism and socialism do
their perfect work in a crowded and crowding population, will not the
dark enigmas of free-labor civilization press heavily upon it, and the
dread images evoked by the prophetic wisdom of Macauley arise
indeed--taxation, monopoly, oppression, misery of the masses,
revolution, standing armies, despotism, &c.? It may yet deserve the
strange epitaph written for this nation by Elwood Fisher:

"Here lies a people, who, in attempting to lib