ion. That the principle which underlay these acts
of fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed
sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government
to be its Messiah to the listening world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord
hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened
that of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr.
"Vice-President" Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the
theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to
the dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of
eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved
for the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The
corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality
of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women
and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and
of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward
of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary
curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon
whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave
States, we read in the "Richmond Examiner": "The establishment of the
Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course
of the mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination,
and Government."

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to
look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in
dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you
will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half
across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery
projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to
the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited
section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to this the
official statement made in 1862, that "there is not one regiment or
battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived
from the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union";
throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech
referred to, and we will con