In the renewed friendly relations at the dinner-table and in the lecture-room, the North of late has had the pleasure of listening to the speeches and discourses of Southern orators, soldiers, and politicians, who, while asserting their loyalty to the Union, claim that that Union was a compact between independent sovereign States, from which each of these independent sovereign States had an undoubted right to secede; our Southern brethren, beaten in the trial of arms, persistently insist that they fought for the right. Besides Jefferson Davis’ _History of the Confederacy_, as bitter to some of its generals as to the North, the Vice-President of that government, of high repute for ability and reasoning powers, Alexander H. Stephens, published two ponderous volumes to prove not only that the South could secede, but that it was obligatory, if it wished to retain its equality and freedom, alleging as the principal reason the wrongful infringement of the right of the South to take its “peculiar property,” slaves, into all the territories of the Union, the common property of all the States. Recently was published Semmes’ _Career of the Sumter and Alabama_, abusive of the Yankee and of Northern friends like Buchanan, insisting on the justice and necessity of secession, and asserting the tyranny and mean oppression of the North. We have had also a republication of Governor Tazewell’s _Review of President Jackson’s Proclamation against Nullification_; and generally the dedication of statues and decorating of the graves of the soldiers of the Confederacy have been taken as occasions to show the justice of the lost cause. It is to be hoped that few agree with General Early’s declamation at Winchester as to those of the South who changed their opinion as to secession: “The Confederate who has deserted since the war is infinitely worse than the one who deserted during the war.” The same opinion as to the right of secession has been very generally held by British politicians; and that opinion to a great extent prevailed, and to-day prevails, in the English army and navy. Mr. John Morley, in his life of Burke, in reference to Burke’s speeches denouncing the conduct of Great Britain towards us as colonies, says that “the current of opinion was then precisely similar in England in the struggle to which the United States owed its existence, as in the great civil war between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union”; “people in England convinced themselves, some after careful examination, others on hearsay, that the South had a right to secede.” Lord Coleridge, who served as one of the British commissioners in the Geneva arbitration, in an address recently delivered at Exeter on Sir Stafford Northcote, says: