prevent it, and perhaps even of the too reckless
disposition that may drag more than the first
combatants into the strife.

The founders of the American constitution
doubted whether the Federation of no more than
the thirteen original States was not too large to
retain identity of interests and stay under one
rule. " But let experience," said Washington,
in one of his letters, "solve the question; to
listen to speculation in such a case were
criminal." Sixty years ago, Jefferson, who in some
respects represents more than Washington the
present mind of the republic, touched on the
possible event that now has happened. In eighteen
'three, when some expected from the acquisition
of Louisiana, future division of the Union into
an Atlantic and a Mississippi Confederacy, he
said—what a year ago there was no statesman
in the North wise enough to repeat after him—
"Let them part by all means if it is for their
happiness to do so. It is but the elder and the
younger son differing. God bless them both,
and keep them in union if it be for their good,
but separate them if better." And again, forty
years ago, in eighteen 'twenty, the Missouri
question produced from him these pregnant
words: " Although I had laid down as a law to
myself, never to write, talk, or even think of
politics, to know nothing of public affairs, and
therefore had ceased to read newspapers, yet
this Missouri question aroused and filled me
with alarm. The old schism, of Federal and
Republican threatened nothing, because it
existed in every State, and united them together
by the fraternism of party; but the coincidence
of a marked principle, moral and political, with
a geographical line, once conceived, I feared
would never more be obliterated from the mind;
that it would be recurring on every occasion,
and renewing irritations until it would kindle
such mutual and mortal hatred as to render
separation preferable to eternal discord. I have
ever been among the most sanguine in believing
that our union would be of long duration; I
now doubt it much, and see the event at no
great distance. My only comfort and confidence
is, that I shall not live to see this." What
Jefferson expected, has occurred.

In 'twenty-six, upon a petty quarrel touching
her dealings with the Indian tribes, Georgia
threatened secession and a Southern
Confederacy. In 'thirty-one, South Carolina nearly
formed one in the course of resistance to a
protective tariff, and she would then have seceded
but for compromise. Tariffs and questions of
Slave and Free States, that are simple questions
of the balance of political power, have been
throughout the great dividing questions, and
the Potomac, on either side of which the North
and South have arrayed their tens of thousands
one against each other, represents fairly enough
the line of geographical division.

The inevitable partition has been seen and
foretold by more than one thoughtful traveller
of late. De Tocqueville prophesied no undivided
permanence for a republic so unwieldy.
Mr. Colley Grattan, a few years ago, came home
from America, and wrote that "the districts of
South, North, and West, are joined like some
wall of incongruous material, with a cement
insufficient to secure perpetual cohesion. They
will inevitably crumble into confusion, though
no man may foretel the period of dissolution."
So apparent was the coming change, that the
Russian writer Ivan Golovin, after a visit to
America, told us six years ago, "I do not give
the Union six years to last." And Mr. Sterling,
in his letter from the Slave States, published four
years ago, described some of the elements of
change, and said, "It appears to me, that amid
so many elements of uncertainty in the future,
both from the excited state of men's minds in
the States themselves, and the complication of
surrounding circumstances, no wise man would
venture to fortel the probable issue of American
affairs during the next four years." The four
years have indeed now come to their close in civil
war.

Not only were there conflicting interests of
North and South, but they told forcibly upon
conflicting characters. Colonisation of the
North was by the sternest of the Puritans. That
of the South was by the proudest and most
reckless of the Cavaliers. The men who
resisted excess of authority in religion and
politics, settled where, as in England, there are
sharp vicissitudes of climate, and where,
therefore, by energy and active daily labour, wealth
or livelihood had to be conquered. The men
who delighted in ungoverned authority, settled
among the luxuries of a tropical climate that
invited them to ease, and where slave labour
poured at their feet the wealth of a rich soil.
Thus in ungoverned authority over their slaves,
and in the ease of a luxurious land, the spirit of
the Cavaliers became intensified, and in their
scorn of hand-labour, or anything so mean as
copper money, the lords of the South became
a race contrasting more strongly than ever
with the active, bustling, cent-getting, and
authority-defying sons of the Pilgrim Fathers.

The American constitution was framed by
slaveholders for a slaveholding republic. But
the accidents of soil and climate, making slave
labour comparatively useless north of a certain
latitude, and apparently convenient south of it,
joined with the ever widening difference of
character in the two populations to clear of slavery
the states of the North and concentrate it in the
South.

Then came the political conflicts, in which
participation of the best men was ever less and
less active. "It is a well-authenticated fact,"
said De Tocqueville, "that at the present day
the most talented men in the United States are
very rarely placed at the head of affairs. The
race of American statesmen has evidently
dwindled most remarkably in the course of the
last fifty years." When that was said, there
were still Webster, Clay, and Calhoun to be
named. Now we are among Tylers, Polks,
and Pierces. Yet there has been no dwindling
of American intellect. The evil is that the
pursuit of politics has been degraded into a trade,