s itself more and more that the one exception alluded to is
the 'head and front of this offending,' the heart and core of this
gigantic difficulty, the one and sole cause of the desperate attempt now
being waged to disturb and break up the process of experiment, otherwise
so peacefully and harmoniously progressing, in favor of the freedom of
man. There is no possibility of grappling rightly with the difficulty
itself, unless we understand to the bottom the nature of the disease.

When the question is considered of the causes of the present war, the
superficial and incidental features of the subject--the mere symptoms of
the development of the deep-seated affection in the central constitution
of our national life--are firstly observed. Some men perceive that the
South were disaffected by the election of Abraham Lincoln and the
success of the Republican party, and see no farther than this. Some see
that the Northern philanthropists had persisted in the agitation of the
subject of slavery, and that this persistency had so provoked and
agitated the minds of Southern man that their feelings had become heated
and irritated, and that they were ready for any rash and unadvised step.
Others see the causes of the war in the prevalence of ignorance among
the masses of the Southern people, the exclusion of the ordinary sources
of information from their minds, the facility with which they have been
imposed on by false and malignant reports of the intentions of the
Northern people, or a portion of the Northern people. Others find the
same causes in the unfortunate prevalence at the South of certain
political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated
theory of State Rights.

A member of President Lincoln's cabinet, speaking of its causes, near
the commencement of the war, says:

'For the last ten years an angry controversy has existed upon this
question of Slavery. The minds of the people of the South have been
deceived by the artful representations of demagogues, who have
assured them that the people of the North were determined to bring
the power of this Government to bear upon them for the purpose of
crushing out this institution of slavery. I ask you, is there any
truth in this charge? _Has the Government of the United States, in
any single instance, by any one solitary act, interfered with the
institutions of the South? No, not in one._'

But let us go behind the sy