The spirit of intervention assumed the form of abolitionism because slavery was odious in name and by association to the Northern mind, and because it was that which most obviously marks the different civilizations of the two sections. The South herself, in her early and later efforts to rid herself of it, had exposed the weak and offensive parts of slavery to the world. Abolition intermeddling taught her at last to search for and defend the assumed social, economic, and political merit and values of the institution. But there never was an hour from the beginning when it did not seem to me as clear as the sun at broad noon that the agitation in any form in the North and West of the slavery question must sooner or later end in disunion and civil war. This was the opinion and prediction for years of Whig and Democratic statesmen alike; and, after the unfortunate dissolution of the Whig party in 1854, and the organization of the present Republican party upon the exclusive antislavery and sectional basis, the event was inevitable, because, in the then existing temper of the public mind, and after the education through the press and the pulpit, the lecture and the political canvass, for twenty years, of a generation taught to hate slavery and the South, the success of that party, possessed as it was of every engine of political, business, social, and religious influence, was certain. It was only a question of time, and short time. Such was its strength, indeed, that I do not believe that the union of the Democratic party in 1860 on any candidate, even though he had been supported also by the entire so-called conservative or anti-Lincoln vote of the country, would have availed to defeat it; and, if it had, the success of the Abolition party would only have been postponed four years longer. The disease had fastened too strongly upon the system to be healed until it had run its course. The doctrine of "the irrepressible conflict" had been taught too long, and accepted too widely and earnestly, to die out until it should culminate in secession and disunion, and, if coercion were resorted to, then in civil war. I believed from the first that it was the purpose of some of the apostles of that doctrine to force a collision between the North and the South, either to bring about a separation or to find a vain but bloody pretext for abolishing slavery in the States. In any event, I knew, or thought I knew, that the end was certain collision and death to the Union.