titution, that shall make the local law of
the Slave States paramount throughout the Union. Mr. Buchanan would stay
the yellow fever by abolishing the quarantine hospital and planting a
good virulent case or two in every village in the land.

We do not underestimate the gravity of the present crisis, and we agree
that nothing should be done to exasperate it; but if the people of the
Free States have been taught anything by the repeated lessons of bitter
experience, it has been that submission is not the seed of conciliation,
but of contempt and encroachment. The wolf never goes for mutton to the
mastiff. It is quite time that it should be understood that freedom is
also an institution deserving some attention in a Model Republic, that
a decline in stocks is more tolerable and more transient than one in
public spirit, and that material prosperity was never known to abide
long in a country that had lost its political morality. The fault of the
Free States in the eyes of the South is not one that can be atoned for
by any yielding of special points here and there. Their offence is that
they are free, and that their habits and prepossessions are those of
Freedom. Their crime is the census of 1860. Their increase in numbers,
wealth, and power is a standing aggression. It would not be enough to
please the Southern States that we should stop asking them to abolish
slavery,--what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should
abolish the spirit of the age. Our very thoughts are a menace. It is not
the North, but the South, that forever agitates the question of Slavery.
The seeming prosperity of the cotton-growing States is based on a great
mistake and a great wrong; and it is no wonder that they are irritable
and scent accusation in the very air. It is the stars in their courses
that fight against their system, and there are those who propose to make
everything comfortable by Act of Congress.

It is almost incredible to what a pitch of absurdity the Slave-holding
party have been brought by the weak habit of concession which has been
the vice of the Free States. Senator Green of Missouri, whose own State
is rapidly gravitating toward free institutions, gravely proposes an
armed police along the whole Slave frontier for the arrest of fugitives.
Already the main employment of our navy is in striving to keep Africans
out, and now the whole army is to mount guard to keep them in. This is
but a trifle to the demands that will b