is
rendered insecure by the Union. Louisiana, which we bought and paid for
to secure the mouth of the Mississippi, claims the right to make her
soil French or Spanish, and to cork up the river again, whenever the
whim may take her. The United States are not a German Confederation, but
a unitary and indivisible nation, with a national life to protect, a
national power to maintain, and national rights to defend against any
and every assailant, at all hazards. Our national existence is all that
gives value to American citizenship. Without the respect which nothing
but our consolidated character could inspire, we might as well be
citizens of the toy-republic of San Marino, for all the protection
it would afford us. If our claim to a national existence was worth a
seven-years' war to establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and
it is daily becoming more apparent, that the people, so soon as they
find that secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to
be juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation.

We have been so much accustomed to the Buncombe style of oratory, to
hearing men offer the pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor
on the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow a great latitude
in such matters, and only smile to think how small an advance any
intelligent pawn-broker would be likely to make on securities of this
description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks out over the country on
the eve of election, and becomes 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 pri