"1. The reality of the _danger_ of disunion, I think, cannot be doubted. The cotton States are far more unanimous for secession than our fathers were when they made our revolution despite of the royalist majority. Practically, their people are unanimous. We can only hope for an effective minority forming itself in some qualified position within the current of popular opinion. A statesmanlike policy would be to aid the formation of that minority--to strengthen it that it may become a majority, to create, to hasten, to swell the reaction for which we hope. "2. Our first necessity is to comprehend the crisis. That is difficult. A man on one side of a question cannot easily turn out the set of ideas which fill his mind and admit the opposite set, even for an experiment. Nothing is so difficult in ordinary experience as to see both sides of a question. For us who have been educated with Northern ideas or in party controversies, we must be almost more than mortal to be able to take a perfectly candid and impartial view of the position of our adversaries. It is necessary to do more--to imagine ourselves in their position, in order to form a policy adapted to their case." TOWNSEND WARD TO TILDEN "PHILADELPHIA, _Dec. 19, 1860_. "DEAR SIR,--Last evening, at Mrs. Gilpin's, I met Mr. Ogden, who kindly gave me a copy of your letter to Mr. Kent.[30] It is so well calculated to do good that I want to obtain copies for distribution. Can you have your publisher send me fifty, with a line stating the cost, which I will remit? Years, perhaps, of the dreary labor of reconstruction of our empire are before us, and it will not do for us who foresaw the storm to desert the wreck while a single plank of hope remains. "I send you a copy of a pamphlet by a Mr. John R. White, of this city. It has some good points. "Very Respectfully, "TOWNSEND WARD, "204 S. 5th St. "_Samuel J. Tilden, Esq._" S. J. TILDEN TO (TOWNSEND WARD) "NEW YORK, _Dec. 1860_. "MY DEAR SIR,--Immediately on receiving your note I caused 50 copies of my letter to Judge Kent to be sent to your address. I acknowledge a deep sense of the favorable estimate you express of that effort, on a sudden occasion, amid the toils which fell upon me as one of the Union committee, to recall our Northern people to the duty of justice and fraternity towards our Southern fellow-countrymen. I have delayed writing to you to say so until I could seize a moment in which to add a suggestion as to the future; and, in the mean time, how rapidly, how fearfully, have events been hurrying forward! "It seems, too, that these events cast largely upon the Virginia statesmen of this generation the momentous duty of saving from destruction a political system which we and the world owe mainly to the Virginia statesmen of the golden era of the Republic." S. L. M. BARLOW TO TILDEN