ft-times smoulder
unseen for centuries ere they burst forth in effects the more powerful
from their long suppression, shaking the earth with the pent-up fury of
ages--forgetting these things and arguing in the present instance from
the few palpable facts found floating upon the surface of our society,
by a tacit consent lay the burden of the war upon the present generation
and its immediate predecessors. Herein lies the error which blinds the
world as well to the warning of the past as to the momentous issue
involved.

Where then shall we look for the cause of that antagonism in which North
and South are arrayed--that bitter hostility setting brother against
brother, and father against child, dividing into two separate portions a
nation descended from the same stock, whose archives are one, all whose
associations of a glorious past are the same, and which has hitherto
swept swiftly on to unparalleled wealth and power, seemingly
indissolubly united, and looking forward to the same glorious and
ever-expanding future? Not to the errors in our political system, for no
faults of government could, in a brief century, have produced such an
upheaving of the foundations of society as we now behold--could have
awakened such a thunder peal as is now causing the uttermost corners of
the earth to tremble with dismay. Not to the institution of slavery, for
however great a curse it maybe to our people and soil, however
brutalizing in its tendencies, however unjust to the negro race, and
opposed to all the principles of enlightenment and human progress--of
whatever crimes it may have been guilty, this last and greatest of
crimes cannot be laid at its door: for the bitterness of feeling between
North and South existed long before the agitation of slavery was dreamed
of, and the latter has only been seized upon as the ready means of
accomplishing a greater design. Finally, not to any supposed desire in
the Southern mind of establishing an independent empire of the South,
whose people should be homogeneous, whose individual interests
identical, and whose climate, productions, and institutions should move
on in undisturbed harmony forever. For to this last a motive is wanting.
Under no government that the world has ever known could the South have
enjoyed so much freedom, such unexampled prosperity, such a rapid growth
in wealth and power, in a word, so much real happiness--which is the sum
of all earthly gifts--as under this which they are