The spirit of the South is and has been belligerent, rancorous, and unscrupulous. The idea of settling any question by the discussion of principles, by mutual concessions, by the understanding, admission, and defence of the rights of each, is not in all their thoughts. They are inherently and essentially invaders and conquerors, in disposition, and so far as it might chance to prove for them feasible, would ever be so in fact. War with them is therefore no matter of child's play, no matter of courtesy or chivalry toward enemies, except from a pompous and theatrical show of a knightly character, which they do not possess;--it is simply a question of pillaging and enslaving, without let or hindrance from moral or humanitary considerations, to any extent to which they may find, by the experiment now inaugurated, their physical power to extend. The North, let it be repeated, entered into this war under a misapprehension of the whole state of the case. It is at the present hour, to a fearful extent, under the same misapprehension. There is still a belief prevailing that the South only needs to be coaxed or treated kindly or magnanimously to be convinced that she has mistaken the North; that she has not the grievances to complain of which she supposes she has, and that she can yet obtain just and equitable treatment from us. There is a tacit assumption in the minds of men that she _must_ be content to receive the usage at our hands which we are conscious that we are ready to bestow, and which has in it no touch of aggressive and unjust intention. It is not realized that the spirit of the South, in respect to the North, in respect to Mexico, in respect to the islands of the sea, and--should their power prove proportionate to their unscrupulous piratical aspirations--in respect to all the nations of the earth, is that of the burglar and the highwayman. It is not realized that the institution of slavery--itself essential robbery of the rights of man; covering the area of half a continent, and the number of four millions of subjects; planted in the midst of an intellectually enlightened people, whose moral sense it has utterly sapped--is essentially a great educational system, as all-pervading and influential over the minds of the whole population as the common schools of New England; and that this grand educational force tends toward and culminates in this same tendency toward robbery and the suppression of human rights or the individual and national rights of all other people--expressed _in a collective and belligerent way_. It is not, as said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast; but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so, and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically, therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the