We, on the other hand, who have no negroes to plant for us, who must pay our farmers far more than the wretched black earns, have no 'mud-sill' whereon to rest. We are manufacturers, and can not form a permanent military nation. We hold in horror the idea of a standing army, and of having our young men who might grow up wealthy and learned--and what Northern youth is there who has not his 'chances'?--become garrison-soldiers for life. We love learning, culture, independence, progress. Year by year sees noble schools rising among us--schools in which every man's son may obtain an excellent free education, and qualify himself for any position in any society. Year by year sees our manufacturers demanding fresh labor, more talent, more youth, more energy, and with them sees the condition of the mechanic becoming more and more ameliorated. Year by year finds the public lecture and library more used by the workman, and the masses rising little by little above their post. In short, we belong to a community whose conditions are those of refinement and of peace; ours is an advanced stage of civilization, and it is our duty to maintain this advance. 'The South' cares nothing for all these things. It 'loathes the very name of free schools,' despises industry and ingenuity, scorns the mechanic, and is altogether, as a community, behind us: as a merely agricultural and would-be merely military government, must essentially be. There are predicaments when the shrewd brute and cunning brigand has his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!' rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to endless shame and ruin. It can never be. The man who believes in peaceable secession must be an idiot. Secession means a military nation living side by side with a non-military nation, which it hates and will do its best to crush. It means a successful rebel flashing the sword in our face at every fancied insult, and all the work of war perennially renewed. It means conservative traitors and doughface scoundrels stirring up riot and ruin among us at every corner, with no man to make them afraid; nourishing the South in our faces and intriguing to bring us into the Confederacy. It means the breaking up of the Union into many fragments--for who supposes that Southern hatred will not intrigue to this effect, and that the pro-slavery Northern men of the present day who have worked so hard to secure to the South the successful solution of the first part of its problem will not be found laboring heart and soul to aid their old masters?