The one and sole answer to all these questions is, Slavery. Some one has said, in speaking of the present crisis, that the sentiment of loyalty has never been prevalent at the South. This is a grand mistake. No people on the surface of the planet have more sincerely felt or more invariably and unflinchingly demonstrated loyalty than they. But it is not loyalty to the American Government, nor indeed to any political institutions whatsoever. It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe--if we except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to its own will. Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it; nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined. The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. Hence for twenty or thirty years--not by virtue of law, but against law--the mails have been searched throughout the South for incendiary matter, with a strictness of censorship unknown to any Government of Europe. Northern men and Europeans immigrating to the South have uniformly been quietly dragooned and terrorized into the acceptance of theories and usages wholly unknown to any free country;--quietly, only because the occasion for doing the same thing violently and barbarously had not yet arrived.