broken, and amicable means of adjustment are repudiated? Peace is the very last thing which secession, if recognized, will give us; it will give us nothing but a hollow truce-time to prepare the means of new outrages. It is in its very nature a perpetual cause of hostility; an eternal, never-canceled letter of marque and reprisal, an everlasting proclamation of border-war. How can peace exist when all the causes of dissension shall be indefinitely multiplied; when unequal revenue laws shall have led to a gigantic system of smuggling; when a general 'stampede of slavery shall take place along the border, with no thought of rendition, and all the thousand causes of mutual irritation shall be called into action, on a frontier of 1,500 miles, not marked by natural boundaries, and not subject to a common jurisdiction or a mediating power? We did believe in peace; fondly, credulously believed, that, cemented by the mild umpirage of the Federal Union, it might dwell forever beneath the folds of the starspangled banner and the sacred shield of a common nationality. That was the great arcanum of policy; that was the State mystery into which men and angels desired to look; hidden from ages, but revealed to us:

"Which kings and prophets waited for,
And sought, but never found,"

a family of States independent of each other for local concerns, united under one government for the management of common interests and the prevention of internal feuds. There was no limit to the possible extension of such system. It had already comprehended half of North America, and it might, in the course of time, have folded the continent in its peaceful, beneficent embrace. We fondly dreamed that, in the lapse of ages, it would have been extended till half the Western hemisphere had realized the vision of universal, perpetual peace. From that dream we have been rudely startled by the array of ten thousand armed men in Charleston Harbor, and the glare of eleven batteries bursting upon the torn sky of the Union, like the comet, which, at this very moment, burns

"In the Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."

Those batteries rained their storm of iron hail on one poor siegeworn company, because in obedience to lawful authority, in the performance of sworn duty, the gallant Anderson resolved to keep

his oath. That brave and faithful band, by remaining at their post, did not hurt a hair of the head of a Carolinian, bond or free. The United States proposed not to reinforce, but to feed them. But the Confederate leaders would not allow them even the poor boon of being starved into surrender; and because some laws had been passed somewhere, by which it was alleged that the return of some slaves (not one from Carolina) had been or might be obstructed, South Carolina, disclaiming the protection of courts and of Congress, which had never been withheld from her, has inaugurated a ruthless civil war. If, for the frivolous reasons assigned, the seceding States have chosen to plunge into this gulf, while all the peaceful temperaments and constitutional remedies of the Union were within their reach, and offers of further compromise and additional guarantees were daily tendered them, what hope, what possibility of peace can there be when the Union is broken up, when, in addition to all other sources of deadly quarrel, a general exodus of the slave population begins (as beyond all question it will), and nothing but war remains for the settlement of controversies? The Vice-President of the new Confederacy states that it rests on slavery; but from its very nature it must rest equally on war; eternal war, first between North and South, and then between the smaller fragments into which some of the disintegrated parts may crumble. The work of demons has already begun. Besides the hosts mustered for the capture or destruction of Washington, Eastern Virginia has let loose the dogs of war on the loyal citizens of Western Virginia; they are straining at the leash in Maryland and Kentucky; Tennessee threatens to set a price on the head of her noble Johnson and his friends; a civil war rages in Missouri. Why, in the name of Heaven, has not Western Virginia, separated from Eastern Virginia by mountain ridges, by climate, by the course of her rivers, by the character of her population and the nature of her industry-why has she not as good a right to stay in the Union, which she inherited from her Washington, as Eastern Virginia has to abandon it for the mushroom Confederacy forced upon her from Montgomery? Are no rights sacred but those of rebellion; no oaths binding but those taken by men already foresworn; are liberty of thought, and speech, and action nowhere to be tolerated except on the part of those by whom laws are trampled under foot, arsenals and mints plundered, governments warred against, and where their patriotic defenders are assailed by ferocious and murderous mobs?

SECESSION ESTABLISHES A FOREIGN POWER ON THE CONTINENT.

Then consider the monstrous nature and reach of the pretensions in which we are expected to acquiesce, which are nothing less than that the United States should allow a FOREIGN POWER, by surprise, treachery, and violence, to possess itself of one half of their territory and all the public property and public establishments contained in it; for if the Southern Confederacy is recognized, it becomes a foreign power, established along a curiously dove-tailed frontier of 1,500 miles, commanding some of the most important commercial and military positions and lines of communication for travel and trade; half the sea-coast of the Union; the navigation of our Mediterranean Sea (the Gulf of Mexico, one third as large as the Mediterranean of Europe), and, above all, the great arterial inlet into the heart of the continent, through which its very life-blood pours its imperial tides. I say we are coolly summoned to surrender all this to a foreign power. Would we surrender it to England, to France, to Spain? Not an inch of it; why then to the Southern Confederacy? Would any other Government on the earth, unless compelled by the direst necessity, make such a surrender? Does not France keep an army of 100,000 men in Algeria to prevent a few wandering tribes of Arabs, a recent conquest, from asserting their independence? Did not England strain her resources to the utmost tension to prevent the native kingdoms of Central India (civilized states two thousand years ago, and while painted chieftains ruled the savage clans of ancient Britain) from re-establishing their sovereignty? and shall we be expected, without a struggle, to abandon a great integral part of the United States to a foreign power?

Let it be remembered, too, that in granting to the seceding States, jointly and severally, the right to leave the Union, we concede to them the right of resuming, if they please, their former allegiance to England, France, and Spain. It rests with them, with any one of them, if the right of secession is admitted, again to plant a European Government side by side with that of the United States on the soil of America; and it is by no means the most improbable upshot of this ill-starred rebellion, if allowed to prosper. Is this the Monroe doctrine for which the United States have been contending? The disunion press in Virginia, last year, openly encouraged the idea of a French protectorate, and her Legislature has, I believe, sold out the James River Canal, the darling

enterprise of Washington, to a company in France, supposed to enjoy the countenance of the Emperor. The seceding patriots of South Carolina were understood by the correspondent of the London Times to admit that they would rather be subject to a British prince than to the Government of the United States. Whether they desire it or not, the moment the seceders lose the protection of the United States, they hold their independence at the mercy of the powerful Governments of Europe. If the navy of the North should withdraw its protection, there is not a Southern State on the Atlantic or the Gulf which might not be re-colonized by Europe in six months after the outbreak of a foreign war.

IMMENSE COST OF THE TERRITORIES CLAIMED BY SECESSION. Then look at the case for a moment in reference to the cost of the acquisitions of territory, made on this side of the continent, within the present century-Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and the entire coast of Alabama and Mississippi-vast regions acquired from France, Spain, and Mexico, within sixty years. Louisiana cost $15,000,000, when our population was 5,000,000, representing, of course, a burden of $90,000,000 at the present day. Florida cost $5,000,000, in 1820, when our population was less than 10,000,000, equal to $15,000,000 at the present day, besides the expenses of General Jackson's war in 1818, and the Florida war of 1840, in which some $80,000,000 were thrown away, for the purpose of driving a handful of starving Seminoles from the Everglades. Texas cost $200,000,000 expended in the Mexican war, in addition to the lives of thousands of brave men; besides $10,000,000 paid to her in 1850, for ceding a tract of land, which was not hers, to New Mexico. A great part of the expense of the military establishment of the United States has been incurred in defending the Southwestern frontier. The troops, meanly surprised and betrayed in Texas, were sent there to protect her defenseless border settlements from the tomahawk and scalping-knife. If to all this expenditure we add that of the forts, the navy yards, the court-houses, the custom-houses, and the other public buildings in these regions, $500,000,000 of the public funds, of which, at least, five sixths have been levied by indirect taxation from the North and Northwest, have been expended in and for the Gulf States in this century. Would England, would France, would any Government on the face of the earth, surrender, without a deathstruggle, such a dear-bought territory ?

THE UNITED STATES CAN NOT GIVE UP THE CONTROL OF THE OUTLET OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

But of this I make no account; the dollars are spent; let them go. But look at the subject for a moment in its relations to the safety, to the prosperity, and the growth of the country. The Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, with their hundred tributaries, give to the great central basin of our continent its character and destiny. The outlet of this mighty system lies between the States of Tennessee and Missouri, of Mississippi and Arkansas, and through the State of Louisiana. The ancient province socalled, the proudest monument of the mighty monarch whose name it bears, passed from the jurisdiction of France to that of Spain in 1763. Spain coveted it, not that she might fill it with prosperous colonies and rising states, but that it might stretch as a broad, waste barrier, infested with warlike tribes, between the Anglo-American power and the silver mines of Mexico. With the independence of the United States, the fear of a still more dangerous neighbor grew upon Spain, and in the insane expectation of checking the progress of the Union westward, she threatened, and at times attempted, to close the mouth of the Mississippi on the rapidly increasing trade of the West. The bare suggestion of such a policy roused the population upon the banks of the Ohio, then inconsiderable, as one man. Their confidence in Washington scarcely restrained them from rushing to the seizure of New Orleans, when the treaty of San Lorenzo El Real, in 1795, stipulated for them a precarious right of navigating the noble river to the sea, with a right of deposit at New Orleans. This subject was, for years, the turning-point of the politics of the West, and it was perfectly well understood that, sooner or later, she would be content with nothing less than the sovereign control of the mighty stream, from its head spring to its outlet in the Gulf; and that is as true now as it was then.

So stood affairs at the close of the last century, when the colossal power of the first Napoleon burst upon the world. In the vast recesses of his Titanic ambition he cherished, as a leading object of his policy, to acquire for France a colonial empire which should balance that of England. In pursuit of this policy he fixed his eye on the ancient regal colony which Louis XIV. had founded in the heart of North America, and he tempted Spain, by the paltry bribe of creating a kingdom of Etruria for a Bourbon prince, to