Lowell confessed in a letter to Mr. Nordhoff,[3] written a few weeks after the election, when it will be remembered there was very little evidence to show that the Republican party had not recoiled from its own success, that he was greatly puzzled to gauge the actual mind of the public. “But one thing seems to me clear,” he says, “that we have been running long enough by dead reckoning, and that it is time to take the height of the sun of righteousness.” It was the time of Buchanan’s attitude of helplessness, the logical result of a life spent in adjustment of principle to occasion. “Is it the effect of democracy,” Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of democracy.” When he wrote this letter, he had already written and indeed printed his paper on “The Question of the Hour” in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1861. However apparently inert and even dazed the North might be, and however paralyzed the federal government, there was little indecision at the South. South Carolina had already taken steps to “withdraw from the Union,” and the Southern public men were in a high state of activity. In this article, which has not been reprinted, Lowell considers briefly the possibility of disunion through the action of the South. He is somewhat incredulous of the imminence of this danger, and the real question of the hour to him is whether the Free States, having taken a stand for freedom, will maintain their self-possession and spirit. He groans over the miserable straits to which the nation is reduced by having at its head in this critical hour a man of such mediocrity as Mr. Buchanan. Again he makes his familiar point that the political training of the party in power has caused a distinct degeneration in politics, and thus has brought about a state of things which renders resistance to the treasonable conduct of the leaders of secession weak and ineffective; and he points out with sagacity a source of weakness, which nearly a generation later was to draw from him a new political moral.