powerless for injury, and may we not anticipate a thorough reversion of Northern judgment? These questions, and others like them, have been met and answered a thousand times by the able leaders of the South. Nothing but the speedy and universal uprising of the Northern people in behalf of State rights and Southern equality can preserve the Union. They have committed the aggressions, let them make the overtures. Is this miracle to be expected, and are we to await credulously its accomplishment? Compromises and compacts, the temporary make-shifts of politicians and philanthropists, will be useless. With what ingenuity the most sacred compact may be perverted, with what facility the most perfect compromise may be broken! You may put a new piece on the old garment, but the rent will be made worse.

The fact is, the Constitution is dead, for it carried with it the seeds of its own dissolution. The Union has achieved its mission; the last page of its history is written, and it may be safely deposited in the glorious archives of the past. The genius of Anglo-Saxon liberty, when she emigrated to these shores, bore twins in her bosom and not a single birth. The Northern race, bold, hardy, intelligent, proud and free, will receive into its embrace the heterogeneous spawn of European civilization, and mold it to its own shape, and prepare it for its own destiny. The Southern people are brave, courteous and gentle, credulous and forbearing—loving friends, chivalrous enemies and good masters, to whose strong and generous hands alone the Almighty would entrust the tutelage of his most helpless and degraded children.

The time for our separation has come, and let all good men unite to avert the calamity of civil war. But at all hazards the dissolution must come. The evolution of history, according to the laws of Providence, which supervise even the falling of a sparrow, necessitates it and demands it. The diversity of character, opinion, interest, climate and institutions in the two sections is beyond remedy. Each has a separate mission to fill and a glorious destiny to accomplish. In our present relations, we incommode each other, threaten the peace of the world, and retard the operations of Providence. Let us part in peace; let us have an equitable distribution of the public property and the public territory; let us have an alliance offensive and defensive; let us scorn the idea, so mournfully entertained by many, that constitutional liberty will perish because we are divorced, that representative government will prove a failure because it becomes our duty and interest to separate. Let us prove by our wisdom and our courage that those great principles are dearer and more powerful than ever. Let us emulate each other only in the arts of peace, in the cultivation of friendship and in the worship of God.

It is unfair to represent this question as one of secession or submission. The word submission, in the sense of political degredation, does not exist in the Southern vocabulary. There is no man in the South so stupid, so cowardly, so base as to be willing to live in the Union as it is. There is no difference between us as to the fanaticism and tyranny of the North, no difference as to the wrongs and injuries of the South. Some of us would secede at once, unconditionally and forever. Others would give the North a last chance to abandon her false position, to make apologies and amend, and to secure us in the strongest bonds imaginable, against not only the encroachments but the existence of the Republican party. The difference is rather nominal than real, for all the conservatives doubt and many despair of proper concessions from the North. With those concessions, disunion is probable, without them it is inevitable.

It is the business of the Cotton States to move first in this important matter. They alone are the great conservators of the institution of slavery. The people of Maryland,