16 their neighbors. In the United States there was no standing army, no great war navy. The immense sums spent by us to avoid or maintain war were used by the Americans to establish schools—in giving-to every citizen, rich or poor, that education, that instruction which constitutes the moral grandeur and the true riches of a people. Their foreign policy was contained in a single maxim. Never to intermeddle in the political quarrels of Europe on the sole condition that Europe would never interfere in their affairs, and would respect the liberty of the seas. Thanks to those wise principles, bequeathed to them by .Washington, in his immortal Farewell .Address, the United States have enjoyed for eighty years a peace undisturbed but once, in 1812, -when they were obliged to withstand England and maintain the rights of neutrals. For the last seventy years, we have spent billions to maintain our liberty or our preponderance in Europe. The United States have employed these billions in ameliorations of all kinds. That is the secret of their prodigious success; their isolation has made their 'prosperity. Suppose, now, that this, separation should be accomplished, and that the new confederacy should comprise all the slave-states ; the North loses at once her power and her institutions. The Republic is stabbed to the heart. There would be in America two rival nations, always on the eve of conflict. Peace would by no means extinguish enmities. It wrould not obliterate the memories of past greatness, nor of the Union destroyed. The South victorious would be doubtless no less a friend of slavery, no less in love with dominion, than in former times. The enemies of slavery, now masters of their own policy, would not surely be made more moderate by separation. . What would the Southern Confederacy be to the North ? A foreign power established in America, with a frontier of fifteen hundred miles —a frontier open on all sides, and consequently, always threatening or threatened. This power, hostile by reason of its vicinity, and still more so on account of its institutions, would possess some of the most important portions of the New World. She would own half of the sea-coasts of the Union—she would Command the Gulf of Mexico, an inland sea one third the size of the Mediterranean. She would be mistress of the mouth of
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