doubt, to swell the resistance against which the
supremacy of the South has just been broken. This, then, is a legal
victory, one of the most glorious spectacles that the friends of liberty
can contemplate on earth. It was the more glorious, the more efforts and
sacrifices it demanded. The Lincoln party had opposed to it, the
Puseyistic and financial aristocracy of New York; the manoeuvres of
President Buchanan were united against it with those of the Southern
States. Many of the Northern journals accused it of treading under foot
the interests of the seaports, and of compromising the sacred cause of
the Union.

To succeed in electing Mr. Lincoln, we must not forget that it was
necessary to put the question of principle above the questions of
immediate interests, which usually make themselves heard so distinctly.
The unity, the greatness of the country, the gigantic future towards
which it was advancing, were so many obstacles arising in the way. Then
came the reckoning of profits and losses, the inevitable crisis, the
Southern orders already withdrawn, the certain loss of money; it seems
to me that men who have braved such chances, have nobly accomplished
their duty.

America, it is said, is the country of the dollar; the Americans think
only of making money, all other considerations are subordinate to this.
If the reproach is sometimes well-founded, we must admit, at least, that
it is not always so. Those who wish to persuade us that the
Abolitionists in this again have simply sought their own interests, by
seeking to break down the competition of servile labor, forget two or
three things: first, that the slaves produce tobacco or cotton, while
the North produces wheat, so that there is not a race in the world that
competes less with it: next, that the cotton of the South is very useful
to the North, useful to its manufactures, useful to its trade, both
transit and commission. The people of the North are not reputed to lack
foresight; they were not ignorant that in electing Mr. Lincoln, they
had, for the time at least, every thing to lose and nothing to gain;
they were not ignorant that Mr. Lincoln occasioned the immediate threat
of secession; that the threat of secession was a commercial crisis, was
the political weakening of the country, and the unsettling of many
fortunes. But neither were they ignorant that above the fleeting
interests of individuals and of the nation, arose those permanent
interests which must