nted under the same Constitution,
and in an age when a victory in the stock-market is of more consequence
than successes in the field, political and economical necessities may be
safely reckoned on as slow, but effective, allies of the old order of
things. The people of this country are too much used to sudden and
seemingly unaccountable political revolutions not to be able to forfeit
their consistency without any loss of self-respect; and the rapidity
with which the Southern Rebellion was forced up to its present
formidable proportions, mainly by party management, is not unlikely to
find its parallel in suddenness of collapse. But whether this prove to
be the fact or not, nay, even if the reestablishment of the Union had
been hopeless from the first, a government which should have abandoned
its capital, which should have flinched from the first and plainest duty
of self-preservation, which should have admitted by a cowardly surrender
that force was law, that treason was constitutional, and fraud
honorable, would have deserved and received the contempt of all
civilized nations, of England among the first.

There is no such profound and universal alienation, still less such an
antagonism in political theory, between the people of the Northern and
Southern parts of the Union, as some English journals would infer from
the foolish talk of a few conceited persons in South Carolina and
Virginia. There is no question between landholders on the one side and
manufacturers and merchants on the other. The bulk of the population,
North and South, are holders of land, while the average size of the
holdings of land under cultivation is probably greater in the Free than
in the Slave States. The largest single estate in the country is, we
believe, in Illinois. Generalizations are commonly unsafe in proportion
as they are tempting; and this, together with its pretty twin-brother
about Cavaliers and Roundheads, would seem to have been hatched from the
same egg and in the same mare's-nest. If we should take the statements
of Dr. Cullen and Mr. Smith O'Brien for our premises, instead of the
manifest facts of the case, our conclusion in regard to Ireland would
be an anachronism which no Englishman would allow to be within half
a century of the actual condition of things. And yet could the Irish
revolutionists of thirteen years ago have had the advantage of a
ministry like that of Mr. Buchanan,--had every Irish officer and soldier
been false