Ah! friend? it is not the negro _per se_ who distracts and threatens to destroy our country--far from it! Negroes did not wrest Texas from Mexico, nor force her into the Union, nor threaten rebellion because California was admitted as a Free State, nor pass the Nebraska bill, nor stuff the ballot-boxes and burn the habitations of Kansas, nor fire on Fort Sumter, nor do any thing else whereby our country has been convulsed and brought to the brink of ruin. It is not by the negro--it is by injustice to the negro--that our country has been brought to her present deplorable condition. Were Slavery and all its evil brood of wrongs and vices eradicated this day, the Rebellion would die out to-morrow and never have a successor. The centripetal tendency of our country is so intense--the attraction of every part for every other so overwhelming--that Disunion were impossible but for Slavery. What insanity in New-Orleans to seek a divorce from the upper waters of her superb river! What a melancholy future must confront St. Louis, separated by national barriers from Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and all the vast, undeveloped sources of her present as well as prospective commerce and greatness! Ponder the madness of Baltimore, seeking separation from that active and teeming West to which she has laid an iron track over the Alleghanies at so heavy a cost! But for Slavery, the Southron who should gravely propose disunion, would at once be immured in a receptacle for lunatics. He would find no sympathy elsewhere. But a nobler idea, a truer conception, of National Unity, is rapidly gaining possession of the American mind. It is that dimly foreshadowed by our President when, in his discussions with Senator Douglas, he said: 'I do not think our country can endure half slave and half free. I do not think it will be divided, but I think it will become all one or the other.' 'A union of lakes, a union of lands,' is well; but a true 'union of hearts' must be based on a substantial identity of social habitudes and moral convictions. If Islamism or Mormonism were the accepted religion of the South, and we were expected to bow to and render at least outward deference to it, there would doubtless be thousands of Northern-born men who, for the sake of office, or trade, or in the hope of marrying Southern plantations, would profess the most unbounded faith in the creed of the planters, and would crowd their favorite temples located on our own soil. But this would not be a real bond of union between us, but merely an exhibition of servility and fawning hypocrisy. And so the Northern complaisance toward slavery has in no degree tended to avert the disaster which has overtaken us, but only to breed self-reproach on the one side, and hauteur with ineffable loathing on the other.