Is it strange that South Carolina raises the Palmetto flag, and sends the order down the whole line to march out of the Union? She has fewer entangling alliances with freedom than any of her followers; and, with an eye sharpened by long observation of the conditions of aristocratic society, sees that its doom is sealed. She knows, as Virginia and Maryland do not, that there can be no more reliable extension of the slave power in the Union, as now constituted, and as it will inevitably be administered in the future. She is sick at heart, and understands that all her physicians are quacks, who propose only palliatives, in helpless inability to cure her disease. What cares she for a new fugitive slave law when the old one cannot be enforced, and every Negro carried back to bondage leaves a town full of new-made abolitionists behind? Will it help her to declare that all the territories shall choose freedom or slavery for themselves, when Yankee Jonathan, German Hans and Irish Patrick are swarming on the borders of every territory where a civilized man can live? The offer of new slave states in the southwestern deserts does not console her, for she remembers that of the four slave states admitted into the Union within the last thirty years, two are insignificant, and Texas and Missouri are already in a state of siege by freedom, while free states stand, rank behind rank, awaiting an open door. Do her comforters offer protection in the territories? New Mexico has 62,000 square miles, and has about one slave to 1,000 square miles, and this is her most hopeful scion at present; very like protecting a dead horse against a general muster of crows. What of the abstract right to carry slaves through states that daily hate slavery more bitterly? Are compromises offered in any of these directions? The spectre of one great compromise, murdered in the Capitol, rises like Banquo’s ghost, and shrieks, “thou sent compromise to the grave; who calls up my unquiet shadow to haunt the day?” A compromise is henceforth only a law; so has slavery willed; freedom responds: “so let it be forevermore.” Lay upon freedom whatever compromises you will, she henceforth walks through and beyond them like a living man through a churchyard full of wavering shadows. What can the Supreme Court do for her case? She has shown us that court can be made to yield to the reigning spirit of the day, and gained all she asked for slavery. Another day will dawn, and the court will look to that rising sun. Will she change the Constitution? But no act of to-day can bind posterity. A perpetual provision for slavery there is setting up a king over the Constitution. The North to-day will set up no king; if it does the North of to-morrow will dethrone him.