ment.

American writers are, of course, well acquainted with such elementary
facts, and, if they would attempt to make Slavery the cause of the
rebellion, they are compelled to use a different but, I think, equally
misleading phrase. I find, for instance, Professor Rhodes saying that
the South went to war for "the extension of Slavery." This sounds more
plausible, because the extension of the geographical area over which
Slavery should be lawful had been a Southern policy, and because the
victory of the party organized to oppose this policy was in fact the
signal for secession. But neither will this statement bear examination,
for it must surely be obvious that the act of secession put a final end
to any hope of the extension of Slavery. How could Georgia and Alabama,
outside the Union, effect anything to legalize Slavery in the Union
territories of Kansas and New Mexico?

A true statement of the case would, I think, be this: The South felt
itself threatened with a certain peril. Against that peril the
extension of the slave area had been one attempted method of protection.
Secession was an alternative method.

The peril was to be found in the increasing numerical superiority of the
North, which must, it was feared, reduce the South to a position of
impotence in the Union if once the rival section were politically
united. Lowell spoke much of the truth when he said that the Southern
grievance was the census of 1860; but not the whole truth. It was the
census of 1860 plus the Presidential Election of 1860, and the moral to
be drawn from the two combined. The census showed that the North was
already greatly superior in numbers, and that the disproportion was an
increasing one. The election showed the North combined in support of a
party necessarily and almost avowedly sectional, and returning its
candidate triumphantly, although he had hardly a vote south of the
Mason-Dixon line. To the South this seemed to mean that in future, if it
was to remain in the Union at all, it must be on sufferance. A
Northerner would always be President, a Northern majority would always
be supreme in both Houses of Congress, for the admission of California,
already accomplished, and the now certain admission of Kansas as a Free
State had disturbed the balance in the Senate as well as in the House.
The South would henceforward be unable to influence in any way the
policy of the Federal Government. It would be enslaved.

It is true that the