rrent, along
the barren ravine of party and sectional strife. It has been shorn of
every prerogative that wore the austere aspect of authority and power.

"The consequence of this demoralization is that States, without regard
to the Federal Government, assume to stand face to face and wage their
own quarrels, to adjust their own difficulties, to impute to each
other every wrong, to insist that individual States shall remedy every
grievance, and they denounce failure to do so as cause of civil war
between States; and as if the Constitution were silent and dead and
the power of the Union utterly inadequate to keep the peace between
them, unconstitutional commissioners flit from State to State, or
assemble at the national capital to counsel peace or instigate war.
Sir, these are the causes which lie at the bottom of the present
dangers. These causes which have rendered them possible and made them
serious, must be removed before they can ever be permanently cured.
They shake the fabric of our National Government. It is to this
fearful demoralization of the Government and the people that we must
ascribe the disastrous defections which now perplex us with the fear of
change in all that constituted our greatness. The operation of the
Government has been withdrawn from the great public interests, in order
that competing parties might not be embarrassed in the struggle for
power by diversities of opinion upon questions of policy; and the
public mind, in that struggle, has been exclusively turned on the
slavery question, which no interest required to be touched by any
department of this Government. On that subject there are widely
marked diversities of opinion and interest in the different portions of
the Confederacy, with few mediating influences to soften the
collision. In the struggle for party power, the two great regions of
the country have been brought face to face upon the most dangerous of
all subjects of agitation. The authority of the Government was relaxed
just when its power was about to be assailed; and the people,
emancipated from every control and their passions inflamed by the
fierce struggle for the Presidency, were the easy prey of revolutionary
audacity.

"Within two months after a formal, peaceful, regular election of the
chief magistrate of the United States, in which the whole body of the
people of every State competed with zeal for the prize, without any new
event intervening, without any new griev