our
politics, by what gift or concession to purchase exemption from that
dreaded blade,--at last reached its ultimate demand. "Will you," it said
to the North, "abdicate the privileges of equal citizenship? Will
you give up this continent, territory, Free States and all, to our
predaceous, blood-eating system? Will you sell into slavery the elective
franchise itself? Will you sell the elective franchise itself into
slavery, and take for pay barely the poltroon's price, that of being
scornfully spared by the sword we stand ready to draw?" The
North excused itself politely. In the softest voice, but with a
soft-voicedness that did not wholly conceal an iron thread of
resolution, it declined to comply with that most modest demand. Then the
sword came out and struck at our life. "Was it matter of choice with us
whether we would fight? Not unless it were also matter of choice whether
we would become the very sweepings and blemish of creation.

"But we might have permitted secession." No, we could not. It was
clearly impracticable. "But why not?" _Because that would have been
to surrender the whole under the guise of giving up half_. Such a
concession could have meant to the people of the rebellious States, and,
in the existing state of national belief, could have meant to our very
selves, nothing other than this:--"We submit; do what you will; we are
shopkeepers and cowards; we must have your trade; and besides, though
expert in the use of yardsticks, we have not the nerve for handling
guns." From that moment we should have lost all authority on this
continent, and all respect on the other.

The English papers have blamed us for fighting; but had we failed to
fight, not one of these censuring mouths but would have hissed at us
like an adder with contempt Nay, we ourselves should, as it were, soon
have lost the musical speech and high carriage of men, and fallen to
a proneness and a hissing, degraded in our own eyes even more than in
those of our neighbors. Of course, from this state we should have risen;
but it would have been to see the redness of war on our own fields
and its flames wrapping our own households. We should have risen, but
through a contest to which this war, gigantic though it be, is but a
quarrel of school-boys.

By sheer necessity we began to fight; by the same we must fight It out.
Compromise is, in the nature of the case, impossible. It can mean only
_surrender_. Had there been an inch more of ground