In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 the American Union was seldom saved by a Northern statesman without the help of San Domingo. People in cities, with a balance at the bank, stocks floating in the market, little children going to primary schools, a well-filled wood-shed, and a house that is not fire-proof, shudder when they hear that a great moral principle has devastated properties and sent peaceful homes up in the smoke of arson. Certainly the Union shall be preserved; at all events, the wood-shed must be. Nothing shall be the midnight assassin of the country until slavery itself is ready for the job. So the Northern merchant kept his gold at par through dread of anti-slavery, and saved the Union just long enough to pay seventy-five per cent, for the luxury of the "Horrors." Did it ever once occur to him that his eminent Northern statesman was pretending something that the South itself knew to be false and never hypocritically urged against the anti-slavery men? Southern men of intelligence had the best of reasons for understanding the phenomena of San Domingo, and while the "Friends of the Black" were dripping with innocent French blood in Northern speeches, the embryo Secessionists at Nashville and Savannah strengthened their convictions with the proper rendering of the same history. Take, as a specimen of their tranquil frame of mind, the following view, which was intended to correct a vague popular dread that in all probability was inspired by Northern statesmen. It is from a wonderfully calm and judicious speech delivered before the Nashville Convention, a dozen years ago, by General Felix Huston of Mississippi. "This insurrection [of San Domingo] having occurred so near to us, and being within the recollection of many persons living, who heard the exaggerated accounts of the day, has fastened itself on the public imagination, until it has become a subject of frequent reference, and even Southern twaddlers declaim about the Southern States being reduced to the condition of St. Domingo, and Abolitionists triumphantly point to it as a case where the negro race have asserted and maintained their freedom. "Properly speaking, this was not a slave insurrection, although it assumed that form after the island was thrown into a revolutionary state. "The island of St. Domingo, in 1791, contained about seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, about fifty thousand of whom were whites, more than double that number of mulattoes and of mixed blood, and the balance were negroes.