finitely crush the possibility of renewed rebellion? The
tremendous taxation which hangs over us gives fearful meaning to these
questions. And they must be answered promptly and practically.

The impossibility of Southern independence was from the first a foregone
conclusion to all who impartially studied the geography of this country
and the social progress of its inhabitants. The West, with its growing
millions vigorously working out the problem of free labor, and of
Republicanism, will _inevitably_ control the Mississippi river and
master the destinies of all soil above the so-called isothermal line,
and probably of much below it. The cotton States, making comparatively
almost no increase in population, receiving no foreign immigration, and
desiring none, have precipitated, by war, their destined inferiority to
the North. It has been from the beginning, only a question of time, when
they should become the weaker, and goaded by this consciousness, they
have set their all upon a throw, by appeal to wager of battle, and are
losing. It is not a question of abolitionism, for it would have been
brought on without abolition. It is not a question of Southern wrongs,
for the South never had a _right_ disturbed; and in addition to
controlling our Government for years, and directly injuring our
manufactures, it long swallowed a disproportionably great share of
government appointments, offices, and emoluments. It is simply the last
illustration in history of a smaller and rebellious portion of a
community forced by the onward march of civilization into subordination
to the greater. The men of the South were first to preach Manifest
Destiny and the subjugation of Cuba and Mexico--forgetting that as
regarded civilization, they themselves, on an average, only filled an
intermediate station between the Spanish Creole and the truly _white_
man of the North. Before manifest destiny can overtake the Mexican, it
must first overtake the Southerner.

Despite all its external show of elan, courtesy, and chivalry, 'the
South,' as it exists, is and ever must be, in the very great aggregate,
inferior to the North in the elements of progress, and in nearly all
that constitutes true superiority. They boast incessantly of their
superior education and culture; but what literature or art has this
education produced amid their thousands of ladies and gentlemen of taste
and of leisure? The Northern editor of any literary magazine who has had
any ex