I doubt not, from the temper of the public mind, that the _Southern States will be allowed to withdraw peacefully_; but when the work of dismemberment begins, we shall break up the fragments from month to month, with the nonchalance with which we break the bread upon our breakfast-table. If all the grave and vital questions which will at once arise among these fragments of the ruptured Republic can be adjusted without resort to arms, then we have made vast progress since the history of our race was written. But the tragic events of the hour will show that we have made no progress at all. We shall soon grow up a race of chieftains, who will rival the political bandits of South America and Mexico, and who will carve out to us our miserable heritage with their bloody swords. The _masses_ of the people dream not of these things. They suppose the Republic can be destroyed to-day, and that peace will smile over its ruins to-morrow. They know nothing of civil war: this Marah in the pilgrimage of nations has happily been for them a sealed fountain; they know not, as others do, of its bitterness, and that civil war is a scourge that darkens every fireside, and wrings every heart with anguish. They are to be commiserated, for they know not what to do. Whence is all this? It has come because the pulpit and press and the cowering, unscrupulous politicians of the North have taught the people that they are responsible for the domestic institutions of the South, and that they have been faithful to God only by being unfaithful to the compact which they have made to their fellow-men. Hence those Liberty Bills which degrade the statute-books of some ten of the free States, and are confessedly a _shameless_ violation of the federal Constitution in a point vital to her honor. We have presented, from year to year, the humiliating spectacle of free and sovereign States, by a solemn act of legislation, _legalizing the theft of their neighbors' property_. I say _theft_, since it is not the less so because the subject of the despicable crime chances to be a slave, instead of a horse or bale of goods.