, in the great debates between Mr.
Webster and Mr. Calhoun, to say nothing of elucidations by previous and
subsequent jurists and statesmen, has been again and again abundantly
demonstrated to be absurd.

2. That the immediate, comprehensive pretext for the Rebellion was the
success of a legal majority having in its platform of principles the
doctrine of the non-extension of involuntary human bondage in the
territories over which the Constitution had given to the whole people
absolute control, a doctrine which the mass of the Southern populations
were educated to believe not only deadly to their local privileges, but
distinctly unconstitutional.

3. That the leaders of the Rebellion frankly admitted, that, excepting
this one point of Constitutional grievance, the interests of the
populations which they represented would be better subserved in the
Union than out of it.

4. That the leaders of the Rebellion appear not to have anticipated
coercion; but yet, from the earliest days of Secession, contemplated
the spoliation of the Southern National property, and particularly the
seizure of the Federal capital.

5. That, even should the independence of the South be acknowledged,
peace could not result so long as Slavery should continue: their avowed
system of reprisals for the certain escape of slaves precluding all
force in any but piratical international law.

6. That the spirit of the Rebellion is the haughty, grasping, and,
except within its own circle, the remorseless spirit universally
characteristic of oligarchies, before the success of whose principles
upon this continent the liberties of the whites could be no safer than
those of the blacks.

"We are the gentlemen of this land," said the Georgian senator, "and
gentlemen always make revolutions in history." And just previously he
had said, with haughty significance, "_Your_ poor population can hold
ward-meetings, and can vote. But _we_ know better how to take care of
ours. They are in the fields, and under the eye of their overseers."

In these two brief remarks, taken singly, or, especially, in
juxtaposition, from so representative a source, and so characteristic
of oligarchical opinions everywhere, appears condensed the suggestive
political warning of these times, indeed of all times, and which a
people regardful of civil and religious liberty can never be slow to
heed.

Let the pride of race and the aristocratic tendencies which underlie the
resistance of