We believe the immediate cause of the Southern Rebellion to be something far deeper than any social prejudice or political theory on the part of slaveholders, or any general apprehension of danger to their peculiar property. That cause is a moral one, and is to be found in the recklessness, the conceit, the sophistry, the selfishness, which are necessarily engendered by Slavery itself. A generation of men educated to justify a crime against the Law of Nature because it is profitable, will hardly be restrained long by any merely political obligation, when they have been persuaded to see their advantage in the breach of it. Why not, then, at once lay the axe to the root of the mischief? Why did not England attack Irish Catholicism in 1848? Why does not Louis Napoleon settle the Papal Question with a stroke of his pen? Because the action of a constitutional government is limited by constitutional obligations. Because every government, even if despotic, must be guided by policy rather than abstract right or reason. Because, in our own case, so much pains have been taken to persuade the people of some peculiar sanctity in human property, and to teach them the duty of yielding their moral instincts to their duty as citizens, that even the Free States are by no means ripe for a crusade. The single and simple duty of the Government is to put down resistance to its legitimate authority; it meddles, and can meddle, with no claim of right except the monstrous one of rebellion. An absolute ruler in advance of his people has been more than once obliged to abandon his reforms to save his throne; a popular government which should put itself in the same position might endanger not only its own hold upon power, (a minor consideration,) but, in such a crisis as ours, the very frame of society itself. We must admit that the administration of Mr. Lincoln has sometimes seemed to us over-cautious; that, while it has not scrupled, and wisely has not scrupled, to go behind the letter of the law to its spirit, in dealing with open abettors of treason in the Free States, because they were perverting private right to public wrong, it has been as scrupulous of meddling with a rebel's legal right in man, though that man were being used for a weapon or a tool against itself, as if to touch it were anathema. The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.