Hence he calls for an offensive attitude on the part of the lovers of freedom. “Are we to be terrified any longer,” he asks, “by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it: we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato patch shall not go along with it. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;--it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.’ We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may as well be easy under the imputation.”