nds
and eyes to heaven, because the election of Mr. Lincoln has caused the
breaking forth of an inevitable crisis, fancy then that the crisis would
have been less serious if it had broken forth four years later, when the
evil would have been without remedy? Already, the five hundred thousand
slaves of the last century have given place to four millions; was it
advisable to wait until there were twenty millions, and until vast
territories, absorbed by American power, had been peopled by blacks torn
from Africa? Was it advisable to await the time when the South should
have become decidedly the most important part of the Confederation, and
when the North, forced to secede, should have left to others the name,
the prestige, the flag of the United States? Do they fancy that, by
chance, with the supremacy of the South, with its conquests, with the
monstrous development of its slavery, secession would have been avoided?
No! it would have appeared some day as a necessary fact; only it would
have been accomplished under different auspices and in different
conditions. Such a secession would have been death, a shameful death.

And slavery itself, who imagines, then, that it can be immortal? It is
in vain to extend it; it will perish amidst its conquests and through
its conquests: one can predict this without being a prophet. But,
between the suppression of slavery such as we hope will some time take
place, and that which we should have been forced to fear, in case the
South had carried it still further, is the distance which separates a
hard crisis from a terrible catastrophe. The South knows not what
nameless misfortunes it has perhaps just escaped. If it had been so
unfortunate as to conquer, if it had been so unfortunate as to carry out
its plans, to create slave States, to recruit with negroes from Africa,
it would have certainly paved the way, with its own hands, for one of
those bloody disasters before which the imagination recoils: it would
have shut itself out from all chance of salvation.

It is not possible, in truth, to put an end to certain crimes, and
wholly avoid their chastisement; there will always be some suffering in
delivering the American Confederation from slavery, and it depends
to-day again upon the South to aggravate, in a fearful measure, the pain
of the transition. However, what would not have been possible with the
election of Mr. Douglas or Mr. Breckenridge, has become possible now
with the election of