ted Slavery, and regarded the
Union as an obstacle to the realization of his wishes respecting it.
Were Slavery universal and supreme among us, or were it abolished and
its influence effaced, you could find more Thugs in Scotland than
Disunionists in America.

IV. And here your statesmen are making a mistake which some of them will
live to realize and rue. They suppose that our country, once fairly
divided and arrayed under two hostile governments, recognizing and no
longer at war with each other, must ever thereafter _remain_ divided.
They never reckoned more wildly. Were their wishes fully realized this
day, and the Confederacy an undisputed fact, a party would instantly
arise--nay, a party already exists--throughout the country, demanding
reunion on any terms. Archbishop Hughes has already in either hemisphere
struck the keynote of this cry. He truly says that our country cannot be
permanently divided. He unworthily adds that, if it cannot be united
under the old Constitution, it must be under a new one--in other words,
under that of the Confederacy. The Democratic party of the Free States,
abandoning the creed of its founders, which has lately ruled the Union
by virtue of a close alliance with the Slave Power of the South,--would,
the day after we had made peace by acknowledging the Southern
Confederacy, reorganize and reagitate under the banner of
'Reconstruction.' Hatred to negroes is the talisman whereby it secures
the votes by pandering to the prejudices of the most ignorant and
vicious Whites--by hostility to negro immigration (from the South),
negro suffrage, negro competition in the labor market, and to negro
humanity in general. That Slavery is the natural and fit condition of
negroes everywhere and at all times--that the abolition of Southern
Slavery would be a great calamity to the white laborers of the
North--such is the political philosophy assiduously dispensed and
greedily imbibed in the grogshops and 'back slums' of every Northern
city, and which politicians and journalists pretending to sense and
decency do not hesitate for their party's and their ambition's sake to
indorse and disseminate. And there are clashes less debased, though
scarcely more heartless, who countenance this inhuman logic. The average
mercantile sentiment of this and other great Northern cities runs thus:
'True, Slavery is unjust and barbarous--it is at once a wrong and a
mistake--but it is not _our_ blunder. Its perils are braved