The insolent pretensions of the Slavocracy were repudiated; its political and ethical maxims were disowned; and after having stirred the noblest impulses of the human heart by the spectacle of its tyranny, its attempt to extend that tyranny only roused an insurrection of the human understanding against the impudence of its logic. The historian can then only say, that the Slave Power "seceded," being determined to form a part of no government which it could not control. The present war is to decide whether its real force corresponds to the political force it has exerted heretofore in our affairs. That this war has been forced upon the Free States by the "aggressions" of the Slave Power is so plain that no argument is necessary to sustain the proposition. It is not so universally understood that the Slave Power is aggressive by the necessities of the wretched system of labor on which its existence is based. By a short exposition of the principles of Slavery, and the expedients it has practised during the last twenty or thirty years, we think that this proposition can be established. And first it must be always borne in mind, that Slavery, as a system, is based on the most audacious, inhuman, and self-evident of lies,--the assertion, namely, that property can be held in men. Property applies to things. There is a meta-physical impossibility implied in the attempt to extend its application to persons. It is possible, we admit, to ordain by local law that four and four make ten, but such an exercise of legislative wisdom could not overcome certain arithmetical prejudices innate in our minds, or dethrone the stubborn eight from its accustomed position in our thoughts. But you might as well ordain that four and four make ten as ordain that a man has no right to himself, but can properly be held as the chattel of another. Yet this arrogant falsehood of property in men has been organized into a colossal institution. The South calls it a "peculiar" institution; and herein perhaps consists its peculiarity, that it is an absurdity which has lied itself into a substantial form, and now argues its right to exist from the fact of its existence. Doubtless, the fact that a thing exists proves that it has its roots in human nature; but before we accept this as decisive of its right to exist, it may be well to explore those qualities in human nature, "peculiar" and perverse as itself, from which it derives its poisonous vitality and strength. It is plain, we think, that an institution embodying an essential falsity, which equally affronts the common sense and the moral sense of mankind, and which, as respects chronology, was as repugnant to the instincts of Homer as it is to the instincts of Whittier, must have sprung from the unblessed union of wilfulness and avarice, of avarice which knows no conscience, and of wilfulness that tramples on reason; and the marks of this parentage, the signs of these its boasted roots in human nature, are, we are