3 ments ? And will any one now lose his time and fair name as an honest and brave citizen, when no foreigner, indeed, threatens your country, at least not directly, but far more, when a reckless host of law-defying men, heaping upon yon the vilest vituperation that men who do not leave behind them the ingenuity of civilization when they relapse into barbarism," can invent—when this host threatens to sunder your country and cleave your very history in twain, to deprive you of youi' rivers which God has given you, to extinguish your nationality, to break down your liberty and to make that land, which the Distributor of our sphere’s geography has placed between the old and older world as the greatest link of that civilization which is destined to encircle the globe—to make that land the hot-bed of angry petty powers, sinking deeper and deeper as they quarrel and fight, and quarrelling and fighting more angrily as they sink deeper ? It is the very thing your foreign enemies desire, and have long desired. When nullification threatened to bring about secession—and the term secession was used at that early period—foreign journals stated in distinct words that England was deeply interested in the contest; for nullification might bring on secession, and secession would cause a general disruption—an occurrence which would redound to the essential benefit of Great Britain. But the traitors, of the North, who have been so aptly called adders or copperheads—striking, as these reptiles do, more secretly and deadly even than the rattlesnake, which has some chivalry, at least in its tail—believe, or pretend to believe, that no fragmentary disruption would follow a division of our country into North and South, and advocate a compromise, by which they affect to believe that the two portions may possibly be reunited after a provisional division, as our pedlers putty a broken china cup. As to the first, that we might pleasantly divide into two comfortable portions, we prefer being guided by the experience of all history, to following the traitors in their teachings. We will not hear of it. We live in an age when the word is Nationalization, not De-nationalization; when fair Italy has risen, like a new-born goddess, out of the foaming waves of the Mediterranean. All destruction is quick and easy ; all growth and formation is slow and toilsome. Nations break up, like splendid mirrors dashed to the ground. They do not break into a number of well-shaped, neatly framed little looking-glasses. But a far more solemn truth even than this comes here into play. It is with nations as with families and with individuals. Those destined by nature to live in the bonds of friendship and mutual kindliness, become the bitterest and most irreconcilable enemies, when once fairly separated in angry enmity; in precisely the same degree in which affection and good-will were intended to subsist between them. We must have back the South, or else those who will not reunite with us must leave the country; we must have the country at any price. If, however, a plain division between the North and the South could take place, who will deny that those very traitors would instantly begin to manoeuvre for a gradual annexation of the North to the South'? It is known to be so. Some of them, void of all shame, have avowed it. They are ready to petition on their knees for annexation to the South, and to let the condescending grantor, ‘‘holding the while his nose,” introduce slavery, that blessed “ corner-stone of” the newest “ civilization,” into the
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