ed the demand of the Northern States at
the time. There was everywhere the most earnest desire to avert
a conflict, and an unwillingness to recognize the possibility of
actual war. The majority of the Republican party in both branches
of Congress was not advocating a more decided or more aggressive
course with the South, during the months of January and February,
than the Cabinet, with Judge Black at its head, was pursuing. The
time for executive acts of a more pronounced character was directly
after the Presidential election, when the first symptoms of resistance
to national authority were visible in the South. If the new Cabinet
had been then in power, the history of the civil revolt might have
been different. But the force that will arrest the first slow
revolution of a wheel cannot stand before it when, by unchecked
velocity, it has acquired a destructive momentum. The measures
which might have secured repression in November would only have
produced explosion in January.

THE PRESIDENT'S NEW POSITION.

The change of position on the part of Mr. Buchanan was not left to
inference, or to the personal assurance of the loyal men who composed
his re-organized Cabinet. He announced it himself in a special
message to Congress on the 8th of January, 1861. The tone was so
different from the message of December, that it did not seem possible
that the two could have been written by the same man. It was
evident from many passages in the second message that he was trying
to reconcile it with the first. This was the natural course
suggested by the pride of one who overrated the virtue of consistency.
The attempt was useless. The North with unaffected satisfaction,
the South with unconcealed indignation, realized that the President
had entirely escaped from the influences which dictated the first
message. He now asserted that, "as the Chief Executive under the
Constitution of the United States," he had no alternative but "to
collect the public revenues, and to protect the public property,
so far as this might be practicable under existing laws." Remarking
that his province "was to execute, and not to make, the laws," he
threw upon Congress the duty "of enlarging their provisions to meet
exigencies as they may occur." He declared it as his own conviction
that "the right and the duty to use military force defensively
against those who resist the federal officers in the exe