Considerations so obvious as these could not, by any ingenuity of party-contrivance, be prevented from forcing themselves by degrees into the minds of the great body of the voters of the Free States. The common sense, the "large roundabout common sense" of the people, slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, came up to the demands of the occasion. The sophistries and fallacies of the Northern defenders of the pretensions of the slave-holding sectional minority were gradually exposed, and were repudiated in the lump. The conviction was implanted in the minds of the people of the Free States, that the Slave Power, representing only a thirtieth part of the population of the Slave States, and a ninth part of the property of the country, was bent on governing the nation, and on subordinating all principles and all interests to its own. Not being ambitious of having the United States converted into a Western Congo, with the traffic in "niggers" as its fundamental idea, the people elected Abraham Lincoln, in a perfectly Constitutional way, President. As the majority of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the Supreme Court was still left, by this election, on the side of the "rights of the South," (humorously so styled,) and as the President could do little to advance Republican principles with all the other branches of the Government opposed to him, the people naturally imagined that the slaveholders would acquiesce in their decision. But such was not the result. The election was in November. The new President could not assume office until March. The triumphs of the Slave Power had been heretofore owing to its willingness and readiness to peril everything on each question as it arose, and each event as it occurred. South Carolina, perhaps the only one of the Slave States that was thoroughly in earnest, at once "seceded." The "Gulf States" and others followed its example, not so much from any fixed intention of forming a Southern Confederacy as for the purpose of intimidating the Free States into compliance with the extreme demands of the South. The Border Slave States were avowedly neutral between the "belligerents," but indicated their purpose to stand by their "Southern brethren," in case the Government of the United States attempted to carry out the Constitution and the laws in the seceded States by the process of "coercion."