But these questions of transient passions and objurgatory provocation are trivial and unimportant. They do not touch the real causes of the difficulty; they are but the froth on the surface of the deep and mighty current of events, which was rushing on to the gulf of rebellion. The time had come, in the history of our country, when, by the necessary working of its institutions, the most solemn question of the age was to be determined. Slavery must either accept its inevitable doom and prepare for ultimate extinction, or it must provide new means for prolonging its existence and reëstablishing its waning power. In three quarters of a century, the Constitution of 1787 had done its work. It had suppressed the immigration of Africans; it had established that of Europeans. Free white labor had demonstrated its superiority and achieved a complete victory over slavery; and the political power, long wielded by the Southern men, had passed forever out of their hands, as the representatives and supporters of the slave policy. In the Senate, in the House of Representatives, in the great majority of States, in all the Territories, and, finally, in the very citadel of their former power, the presidential mansion, their almost immemorial superiority had been utterly overthrown. The Government was about to assume its true character, as the home of liberty and the veritable asylum of humanity. Slavery, fallen into the minority, was about to experience an accelerated decline and eventually to disappear. To resist this doom, was to fight against the Constitution and against destiny. The people of the Southern States were wholly unwilling to accept the condition to which the legitimate workings of the Constitution had fairly brought them. Being a minority in numbers and in representative weight, they rose up in rebellion against this unalterable fact. They foresaw it, and, by every possible device, resisted it before it came. When it arrived, they resisted still more madly, even to the extent of self-destruction. The minority was arrayed not merely against the majority, but also against the necessary results of our institutions and against the decrees of nature: that is to say, against the law of man, and against the law of God. The majority was expected to give way, and to permit the engine of national progress to be reversed, our eighty years of glorious history to be undone, and humanity itself to be turned back upon the dreary path of its earliest and saddest struggles. This refused, the alternative was the destruction of the Government.