ood, has been staked on a turn of the cards.
A general skepticism has thus been induced, exceedingly dangerous
in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has
transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government,
and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to
a party. For thousands of families every change in the National
Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has
thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability
would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the
whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative
to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure.
Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington,
and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer
it to the dominant faction at home.

The subservience on the question of Slavery, which has hitherto
characterized both the great parties of the country, has strengthened
the hands of the extremists at the South, and has enabled them to get
the control of public opinion there by fostering false notions of
Southern superiority and Northern want of principle. We have done so
much to make them believe in their importance to us, and given them so
little occasion even to suspect our importance to them, that we have
taught them to regard themselves as the natural rulers of the country,
and to look upon the Union as a favor granted to our weakness, whose
withdrawal would be our ruin. Accordingly, they have grown more and more
exacting, till at length the hack politicians of the Free States have
become so imbued with the notion of yielding, and so incapable of
believing in any principle of action higher than temporary expedients
to carry an election, or any object nobler than the mere possession of
office for its own sake, that Mr. Buchanan gravely proposes that the
Republican party should pacify South Carolina by surrendering the very
creed that called it into existence and holds it together, the only
fruit of its victory that made victory worth having. Worse than this,
when the Free States by overwhelming majorities have just expressed
their conviction, that slavery, as he creature of local law, can claim
no legitimate extension beyond the limits of that law, he asks their
consent to denationalize freedom and to nationalize slavery by an
amendment of the Federal Cons