When the question is considered of the causes of the present war, the superficial and incidental features of the subject--the mere symptoms of the development of the deep-seated affection in the central constitution of our national life--are firstly observed. Some men perceive that the South were disaffected by the election of Abraham Lincoln and the success of the Republican party, and see no farther than this. Some see that the Northern philanthropists had persisted in the agitation of the subject of slavery, and that this persistency had so provoked and agitated the minds of Southern man that their feelings had become heated and irritated, and that they were ready for any rash and unadvised step. Others see the causes of the war in the prevalence of ignorance among the masses of the Southern people, the exclusion of the ordinary sources of information from their minds, the facility with which they have been imposed on by false and malignant reports of the intentions of the Northern people, or a portion of the Northern people. Others find the same causes in the unfortunate prevalence at the South of certain political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated theory of State Rights. A member of President Lincoln's cabinet, speaking of its causes, near the commencement of the war, says: 'For the last ten years an angry controversy has existed upon this question of Slavery. The minds of the people of the South have been deceived by the artful representations of demagogues, who have assured them that the people of the North were determined to bring the power of this Government to bear upon them for the purpose of crushing out this institution of slavery. I ask you, is there any truth in this charge? _Has the Government of the United States, in any single instance, by any one solitary act, interfered with the institutions of the South? No, not in one._'