States, the "Saturday Review," one of
the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to learn
by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.

Meanwhile the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all these
trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything, the
essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man has
a direct interest in the stability of the national government. So
abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal intervention
with the machine of administration, so almost superstitious in adherence
to constitutional forms, as to be for a moment staggered by the claim to
a _right_ of secession set up by all the Cotton States, admitted by the
Border Slave-States, which had the effrontery to deliberate between
their plain allegiance and their supposed interest, and but feebly
denied by the Administration then in power. The usual panacea of palaver
was tried; Congress did its best to add to the general confusion of
thought; and, as if that were not enough, a Convention of Notables
called simultaneously to thresh the straw of debate anew, and to
convince thoughtful persons that men do not grow wiser as they grow
older. So in the two Congresses the notables talked,--in the one,
those who ought to be shelved, in the other, those who were shelved
already,--while those who were too thoroughly shelved for a seat in
either addressed Great Union Meetings at home. Not a man of them but had
a compromise in his pocket, adhesive as Spalding's glue, warranted to
stick the shattered Confederacy together so firmly, that, if it over
broke again, it must be in a new place, which was a great consolation.
If these gentlemen gave nothing very valuable to the people of the Free
States, they were giving the Secessionists what was of inestimable
value to them,--Time. The latter went on seizing forts, navy-yards, and
deposits of Federal money, erecting batteries, and raising and arming
men at their leisure; above all, they acquired a prestige, and
accustomed men's minds to the thought of disunion, not only as possible,
but actual. They began to grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute
submission to their rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise
of legitimate authority on the part of the General Government as
_Coercion_,--a new term, by which it was sought to be established as a
principle of constitutional law, that it is always the Northern bull
that ha