es a chronic disease in the
two houses of Congress, has so accustomed us to dissociate words and
things, and to look upon strong language as an evidence of weak
purpose, that we attach no meaning whatever to declamation. Our
Southern brethren have been especially given to these orgies of
loquacity, and have so often solemnly assured us of their own courage,
and of the warlike propensities, power, wealth, and general superiority
of that part of the universe which is so happy as to be represented by
them, that, whatever other useful impression they have made, they
insure our never forgetting the proverb about the woman who talks of
her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she has hitherto failed
in the application of her enterprise to manufacturing purposes of a
more practical kind, has always been able to match every yard of
printed cotton from the North with a yard of printed fustian, the
product of her own domestic industry. We have thought no harm of this,
so long as no Act of Congress required the reading of the
"Congressional Globe." We submitted to the general dispensation of
long-windedness and short-meaningness as to any other providental
visitation, endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine
government of the world in the midst of so much that was past
understanding. But we lost sight of the metaphysical truth, that,
though men may fail to convince others by a never so incessant
repetition of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually persuade
themselves, and impregnate their own minds and characters with a belief
in fallacies that have been uncontradicted only because not worth
contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by dint of continued
reiteration, have persuaded themselves to accept their own flimsy
assumptions for valid statistics, and at last actually believe
themselves to be the enlightened gentlemen, and the people of the Free
States the peddlers and sneaks they have so long been in the habit of
fancying. They have argued themselves into a kind of vague faith that
the wealth and power of the Republic are south of Mason and Dixon's
line; and the Northern people have been slow in arriving at the
conclusion that treasonable talk would lead to treasonable action,
because they could not conceive that anybody should be so foolish as to
think of rearing an independent frame of government on so visionary a
basis. Moreover, the so often recurring necessity, incident to our
system, of obt