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managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states
moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial
guide-posts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. The
advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp
practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our
voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind
of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses
of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like
a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before
the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have
been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after
parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. A
siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in
capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be
terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of
Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as
harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as
the spoiled child's refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a
dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We
will not allow it; we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion
to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system
of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by
the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis;
the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in
Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with
it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the
sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force.
We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the
Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it
and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in
their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the
insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the
vindication of an elder doom;--it is for us to assert and to secure the
claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratifie