5 the majority of the people here to accept them, the breach would only be salved over, not healed ; there would still remain a powerful minority, ready on the first reflux of popular opinion to swell again into a majority, and disown the bargain into which the country had temporarily been betrayed. The voters of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would still be the same men who elected Mr. Lincoln by an overwhelming majority in answer to the course of intimidation and fraud pursued in Kansas. To leave the comparatively firm ground on which we now stand, and destroy the Government of the United States, under which we have so long prospered, in the hope of constructing a better one under such auspices, and out of such incongruous materials, would be the wildest and most impracticable of all speculations, and do as much discredit to the heads of those who engaged in it as their hearts. Such safety as there is for us—and it will be our own fault if it is anything else than entire—must be" sought in drawing the ties that bind us together, which had been relaxed in the sunshine of prosperity, closer as the storm increases, and- remembering that every star that still shines in our flag is more valuable for the absence of those which we have lost. That disloyalty exists, and surrounds us like a miasma, vitiating the purer air, is only too true, and it is not less sure that if the war which we are now waging for the restoration of the Union as it was, shall prove unsuccessful, we shall be plunged into another for the defence of the Union as it now is. Let no man imagine that if commissioners from Washington and Richmond, were to meet on the banks of the Rappahannock, and arrange terms of separation, giving us all that we still hold, Maryland, Western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Orleans, the pains of war—taxation, conscription, uncertainty for the future, would be over, and the blessings of peace at hand. They might perhaps, indeed, be ours, if we were like other and more fortunate countries, of which we read—like England, France, or Russia, where the idea of partition or dismemberment could not be suggested by the worst and most desperate revolutionist, during the wildest period of faction, without accumulating a cloud of odium around his head, and exposing him to destruction at the hands of his own followers. We should, it may be said, be great in territory, powerful in arms, abounding in resources, after the South was gone; while the right,to descend the Mississippi might be secured by material guarantees, or its loss compensated by the railroads, lakes, and canals; leading directly from the West, through the Atlantic States, to the great marts of Europe. But Mr. Hughes and his coadjutors will not suffer this to be, will not allow us to look forward to repose and unity, even if we take their advice and recognize the Confederacy. They look at the Constitution and read in it Secession, the right to exclude States, and of States to depart at pleasure, and are unable to perceive that there is a moral obligation, where our country is in question, prior and paramount to positive law. The terrible lesson of the last few years is, that whatever constitutions or their interpreters may say about the right to break up a nation at pleasure, there is a natural law which cannot be disregarded with impunity, that will, like all natural laws, avenge its violated authority on all who will not understand
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