above
their post. In short, we belong to a community whose conditions are
those of refinement and of peace; ours is an advanced stage of
civilization, and it is our duty to maintain this advance.

'The South' cares nothing for all these things. It 'loathes the very
name of free schools,' despises industry and ingenuity, scorns the
mechanic, and is altogether, as a community, behind us: as a merely
agricultural and would-be merely military government, must essentially
be. There are predicaments when the shrewd brute and cunning brigand has
his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till
its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will
drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!'
rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to endless
shame and ruin.

It can never be. The man who believes in peaceable secession must be an
idiot. Secession means a military nation living side by side with a
non-military nation, which it hates and will do its best to crush. It
means a successful rebel flashing the sword in our face at every fancied
insult, and all the work of war perennially renewed. It means
conservative traitors and doughface scoundrels stirring up riot and ruin
among us at every corner, with no man to make them afraid; nourishing
the South in our faces and intriguing to bring us into the Confederacy.
It means the breaking up of the Union into many fragments--for who
supposes that Southern hatred will not intrigue to this effect, and that
the pro-slavery Northern men of the present day who have worked so hard
to secure to the South the successful solution of the first part of its
problem will not be found laboring heart and soul to aid their old
masters?

_Vae victis!_ If we do not rise in our might and crush this rebellion
root and branch, we shall be crushed--and no honest, observant man can
deny it. Fire and water may as well mingle as we two hope to inhabit the
same continent. It is hammer or anvil with us now, and no escape. They
realize with delight that our year of procrastination has been to them
more than two years of preparation, and so confident are they of success
as to even wish to conceal their numbers.

Reader, this is not an emergency whose evil results may fall on others
and not on yourself. There is not one loyal American to whom Southern
success does not portend misery, poverty, degradation. We have not yet
felt the f