And just as the New England idea, organized in the great Middle States and the Northwest, is approaching its day of conquest in the North, is the idea of South Carolina subduing the fifteen Southern States. South Carolina is now the most completely aristocratic State in the Confederacy. Fifty-eight per cent of her entire population are slaves. Her basis of representation in her Legislature is equally slave property and white population; one sixty-second of white people and one sixty-second of property having the same political weight. Her 25,000 slaveholders rule the little State with a rod of iron, and this phalanx is wheeled about by a smaller number of men than governs any State of the Union. In the Revolution the great men of Maryland and Virginia clasped the hands of the North, and thus governed the Carolinas, wrested them from utter subjugation, and organized the Constitution over their heads. But South Carolina, Georgia and their children along the Gulf of Mexico have been gaining in power every day in the last half century. South Carolina is now captain of eight States, with a white population of more than 2,000,000, owning a slave population of 1,800,000; 42 per cent of the whole people; with a monopoly of the cotton, rice and sugar crops; and a rapidly consolidating unanimity of sentiment. The seven more northern Slave States have a white population of 5,000,000, with 27 per cent of slavery. But they have no peculiar staple of production, excepting young negroes, and are wavering in social ideas and political policy. Freedom has planted a line of batteries along their borders in the form of nine growing cities containing a million and a half of people, in all of which free discussion is practically vindicated; several being already in the hands of the Northern idea. Thus wavering between extremes, these seven States are now being fought over as the body of Moses was by the angel and the Dragon. South Carolina, foremost of the host of despotism, has them by the throat, haling them towards the precipice of disunion. She has conquered them in every battle since they shrank from Northern fellowship; she brought in three slave States from the Louisiana Purchase; she drove the country into the Mexican war and secured Texas; she repealed the Missouri Compromise; she has procured the Dred Scott decision; and now, on the refusal of the North to ratify it, threatens to dissolve the Union, and commands the Central Slave States to come on. Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Jackson, Benton; the great men of this region who withstood her claims are all dead, and who are their successors? All things look fearfully like a surrender of the seven northern Slave States to the idea of South Carolina and her seven confederates, just as the entire North has been wheeled into line by New England and her children of the North.