, the North nothing to lose; the North nothing
to offer, the South nothing to covet. Nor is this all: the North, as in
an impregnable fortress, defies the attack of the South. Immense
trackless solitudes; no cities, no tillage, no roads; deserts, forests,
marshes; bleak table-lands, snowy mountains; unlocated, flitting,
receding populations; no capitals, or marts, or strong places, or
fruitful vales, to hold as hostages for submission; fearful winters and
many months of them;--nature herself fights and conquers for the
barbarian. What madness shall tempt the South to undergo extreme risks
without the prospect or chance of a return? True it is, ambition, whose
very life is a fever, has now and then ventured on the reckless
expedition; but from the first page of history to the last, from Cyrus
to Napoleon, what has the Northern war done for the greatest warriors
but destroy the flower of their armies and the _prestige_ of their name?
Our maps, in placing the North at the top, and the South at the bottom
of the sheet, impress us, by what may seem a sophistical analogy, with
the imagination that Huns or Moguls, Kalmucks or Cossacks, have been a
superincumbent mass, descending by a sort of gravitation upon the fair
territories which lie below them. Yet this is substantially
true;--though the attraction towards the South is of a moral, not of a
physical nature, yet an attraction there is, and a huge conglomeration
of destructive elements hangs over us, and from time to time rushes down
with an awful irresistible momentum. Barbarism is ever impending over
the civilized world. Never, since history began, has there been so long
a cessation of this law of human society, as in the period in which we
live. The descent of the Turks on Europe was the last instance of it,
and that was completed four hundred years ago. They are now themselves
in the position of those races, whom they themselves formerly came down
upon.

6.

As to the instances of this conflict between North and South in the
times before the Christian era, we know more of them from antiquarian
research than from history. The principal of those which ancient writers
have recorded are contained in the history of the Persian Empire. The
wandering Tartar tribes went at that time by the name of Scythians, and
had possession of the plains of Europe as well as of Asia. Central
Europe was not at that time the seat of civilized nations; but from the
Chinese Sea even to the R