trong and generous hands alone the Almighty would entrust the
tutelage of his most helpless and degraded children.

The time for our separation has come, and let all good men unite to
avert the calamity of civil war. But at all hazards the dissolution must
come. The evolution of history, according to the laws of Providence,
which supervise even the falling of a sparrow, necessitates it and
demands it. The diversity of character, opinion, interest, climate and
institutions in the two sections is beyond remedy. Each has a separate
mission to fill and a glorious destiny to accomplish. In our present
relations, we incommode each other, threaten the peace of the world, and
retard the operations of Providence. Let us part in peace; let us have
an equitable distribution of the public property and the public
territory; let us have an alliance offensive and defensive; let us scorn
the idea, so mournfully entertained by many, that constitutional liberty
will perish because we are divorced, that representative government will
prove a failure because it becomes our duty and interest to separate.
Let us prove by our wisdom and our courage that those great principles
are dearer and more powerful than ever. Let us emulate each other only
in the arts of peace, in the cultivation of friendship and in the
worship of God.

It is unfair to represent this question as one of secession or
submission. The word submission, in the sense of political degredation,
does not exist in the Southern vocabulary. There is no man in the South
so stupid, so cowardly, so base as to be willing to live in the Union as
it is. There is no difference between us as to the fanaticism and
tyranny of the North, no difference as to the wrongs and injuries of the
South. Some of us would secede at once, unconditionally and forever.
Others would give the North a last chance to abandon her false position,
to make apologies and amend, and to secure us in the strongest bonds
imaginable, against not only the encroachments but the existence of the
Republican party. The difference is rather nominal than real, for all
the conservatives doubt and many despair of proper concessions from the
North. With those concessions, disunion is probable, without them it is
inevitable.

It is the business of the Cotton States to move first in this important
matter. They alone are the great conservators of the institution of
slavery. The people of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri a