perhaps one day prefer
returning to the bosom of the Union, to plunging into the extremity of
misfortune. In this case, again, the question of affranchisement will
have made vast strides. The United States will have taken a decided
position in the absence of the South, which its return cannot destroy;
convictions will be fixed, the final impulse will have been given, and
to this impulse, the South, come to repentance, will know that nothing
is left it but to submit.

Finally comes a last hypothesis, which I mention because it is necessary
to foresee every possibility. Under the combined influence of the border
States and the States of the North, equally desirous of maintaining the
Union, the attempts of the extreme South will have failed, its secession
will have lasted only a few months, and a compromise will have served to
cover its retreat. But what compromise could compensate for a fact so
important as the election of Mr. Lincoln? It has a deep significance
which no compromise will remove; it signifies that the conquests of
slavery are ended. This proven, the future is easy to foresee:
increasing majorities in the North, increasing disproportion of the two
parts of the Confederation. At the end of the four years of a Lincoln
administration, the slave States will have lost all hope of struggling,
with their eight thousand whites charged with keeping four millions of
blacks, against the twenty millions of citizens that inhabit the free
States. Let us add that, the future once fixed and the question of
preponderance once resolved, many passions will moderate by degrees. The
number of free States will increase, not only by the settling of new
territories, but also by the affranchisement of the thinly scattered
slaves, becoming continually more thinly scattered, of Maryland, of
Delaware, or of Missouri. We can even now describe this affranchisement,
so well is the _American method_ known. It consists, as every one knows,
in emancipating the children that are to be born. This is the method
which has been uniformly applied in the Northern States, and which will
be doubtless applied some day in the border States, provided, however,
civil war does not come to accomplish a very different emancipation
--emancipation by the rising of the slaves. There will be nothing
of this, I hope; pacific progress will have its way. We shall
then see these intermediate States, one after the other, regaining life
in the same time as liberty: