The impossibility of Southern independence was from the first a foregone conclusion to all who impartially studied the geography of this country and the social progress of its inhabitants. The West, with its growing millions vigorously working out the problem of free labor, and of Republicanism, will _inevitably_ control the Mississippi river and master the destinies of all soil above the so-called isothermal line, and probably of much below it. The cotton States, making comparatively almost no increase in population, receiving no foreign immigration, and desiring none, have precipitated, by war, their destined inferiority to the North. It has been from the beginning, only a question of time, when they should become the weaker, and goaded by this consciousness, they have set their all upon a throw, by appeal to wager of battle, and are losing. It is not a question of abolitionism, for it would have been brought on without abolition. It is not a question of Southern wrongs, for the South never had a _right_ disturbed; and in addition to controlling our Government for years, and directly injuring our manufactures, it long swallowed a disproportionably great share of government appointments, offices, and emoluments. It is simply the last illustration in history of a smaller and rebellious portion of a community forced by the onward march of civilization into subordination to the greater. The men of the South were first to preach Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of Cuba and Mexico--forgetting that as regarded civilization, they themselves, on an average, only filled an intermediate station between the Spanish Creole and the truly _white_ man of the North. Before manifest destiny can overtake the Mexican, it must first overtake the Southerner.