, and has been for years an unsafe spot for a slave-hunter.
Their interests and their sympathies are all with the Northern States.
What idle babble, then, is this theory of a third Confederacy, to be
constructed out of the middle Atlantic States and the Northwest!

If, as one of our orators says, New England is the brain of this
country, then the Northwest is its bone and muscle, ready to cultivate
its wide prairies and feed the world,--or, if need be, to use the same
strength in crushing treason, and in preserving the Territories for free
settlers.

CONCERNING FUTURE YEARS

Does it ever come across you, my friend, with something of a start, that
things cannot always go on in your lot as they are going now? Does not a
sudden thought sometimes flash upon you, a hasty, vivid glimpse, of what
you will be long hereafter, if you are spared in this world? Our common
way is too much to think that things will always go on as they are
going. Not that we clearly think so: not that we ever put that opinion
in a definite shape, and avow to ourselves that we hold it: but we live
very much under that vague, general impression. We can hardly help it.
When a man of middle age inherits a pretty country-seat, and makes up
his mind that be cannot yet afford to give up business and go to live
there, but concludes that in six or eight years he will be able with
justice to his children to do so, do you think he brings plainly before
him the changes which must be wrought on himself and those around him
by these years? I do not speak of the greatest change of all, which may
come to any of us so very soon: I do not think of what may be done
by unlooked-for accident: I think merely of what must be done by the
passing on of time. I think of possible changes in taste and feeling,
of possible loss of liking for that mode of life. I think of lungs that
will play less freely, and of limbs that will suggest shortened walks,
and dissuade from climbing hills. I think how the children will have
outgrown daisy-chains, or even got beyond the season of climbing trees.
The middle-aged man enjoys the prospect of the time when he shall go to
his country house; and the vague, undefined belief surrounds him, like
an atmosphere, that he and his children, his views and likings, will be
then just such as they are now. He cannot bring it home to him at how
many points change will be cutting into him, and hedging him in, and
paring him down. And we all live