Believing thus, I have for years past denounced those who taught that doctrine, with all the vehemence, the bitterness, if you choose--I thought it a righteous, a patriotic bitterness--of an earnest and impassioned nature. * * * But the people did not believe me, nor those older and wiser and greater than I. They rejected the prophecy, and stoned the prophets. The candidate of the Republican party was chosen President. Secession began. Civil war was imminent. It was no petty insurrection, no temporary combination to obstruct the execution of the laws in certain States, but a revolution, systematic, deliberate, determined, and with the consent of a majority of the people of each State which seceded. Causeless it may have been, wicked it may have been, but there it was--not to be railed at, still less to be laughed at, but to be dealt with by statesmen as a fact. No display of vigor or force alone, however sudden or great, could have arrested it even at the outset. It was disunion at last. The wolf had come, but civil war had not yet followed. In my deliberate and solemn judgment there was but one wise and masterly mode of dealing with it. Non-coercion would avert civil war, and compromise crush out both abolitionism and secession. The parent and the child would thus both perish. But a resort to force would at once precipitate war, hasten secession, extend disunion, and while it lasted utterly cut off all hope of compromise. I believed that war, if long enough continued, would be final, eternal disunion. I said it; I meant it; and accordingly, to the utmost of my ability and influence, I exerted myself in behalf of the policy of non-coercion. It was adopted by Mr. Buchanan's administration, with the almost unanimous consent of the Democratic and Constitutional Union parties in and out of Congress; and in February, with the consent of a majority of the Republican party in the Senate and the House. But that party most disastrously for the country refused all compromise. How, indeed, could they accept any? That which the South demanded, and the Democratic and Conservative parties of the North and West were willing to grant, and which alone could avail to keep the peace and save the Union, implied a surrender of the sole vital element of the party and its platform, of the very principle, in fact, upon which it had just won the contest for the Presidency, not, indeed, by a majority of the popular vote--the majority was nearly a million against it,--but under the forms of the Constitution. Sir, the crime, the "high crime," of the Republican party was not so much its refusal to compromise, as its original organization upon a basis and doctrine wholly inconsistent with the stability of the Constitution and the peace of the Union.