? You are not a
politician, and will tell me the honest facts."

"Yes, we are going out,'--there is no doubt of it, I have not been a
seceder,--I have even been called one of the disaffected; but I am
obliged to admit that secession is the will of the community. Perhaps
you at the North don't believe that we are honest in our professions and
actions. We are so. The Carolinians really mean to go out of the Union,
and don't mean to come back. They say that they _are_ out, and they
believe it. And now, what are you going to do with us? What is the
feeling at the North?"

"The Union must and shall be preserved, at all hazards. That famous
declaration expresses the present Northern popular sentiment. When I
left, people were growing martial; they were joining military companies;
they wanted to fight; they were angry."

"So I supposed. That agrees with what I hear by letter. Well, I am very
sorry for it. Our people here will not retreat; they will accept a war,
first. If you preserve the Union, it must be by conquest. I suppose you
can do it, if you try hard enough. The North is a great deal stronger
than the South; it can desolate it,--crush it. But I hope it won't be
done. I wish you would speak a good word for us, when you go back. You
can destroy us, I suppose. But don't you think it would be inhuman?
Don't you think it would be impolitic? Do you think it would result in
sufficient good to counterbalance the evident and certain evil?"

"Why, people reason in this way. They say, that, even if we allow the
final independence of the seceding States, we must make it clear that
there is no such thing as the right of secession, but only that of
revolution or rebellion. We must fix a price for going out of the Union,
which shall be so high that henceforward no State will ever be willing
to pay it. We must kill, once for all, the doctrine of peaceable
secession, which is nothing else than national disintegration and ruin.
Lieutenant-Governor Morton of Indiana declares in substance that England
never spent blood and money to wiser purpose than when she laid down
fifty thousand lives and one hundred millions of pounds to prevent her
thirteen disaffected colonies from having their own way. No English
colony since has been willing to face the tremendous issue thus offered
it. Just so it is the interest, it is the sole safety of the Federal
Government, to try to hold in the Cotton States by force, and, if they
go out, to oblige th