The answer is still, slavery. The cause of causes, lying back of the whole wide gulf of difference in Northern and Southern politics is still, slavery. From the date of our Constitution, opinion has divided into two great currents, North and South, in behalf of paramount allegiance to the General Government at the North, and paramount allegiance to the several State Governments at the South. The resolutions of '98 and '99 began the public expression of a political heresy, which has gone on augmenting at the South from that day to this. At the North, the Government of the United States was never feared as likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the South, on the contrary, the United States Government was, from the first, looked upon with a suspicion plainly expressed in the speech, for example, of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia convention, which consented reluctantly that the State should come into the Union, lest the National Government might, in some unforeseen contingency, interfere with the interests of the institution of slavery. That fear, the determination to have it otherwise, to make the General Government, on the contrary, the engine and supporter of slavery, the propagandist of slavery, in fine; has been always, since, the animating spirit of Southern political doctrine. A doctrine so inaugurated and developed has endeavored to engraft itself by partisan alliance upon the Democratic party of the North, but always hitherto with an imperfect success. State Rights, as affirmed at the North, has never been a dogma of any considerable power, because it has rested on no substratum of suspicion against the General Government, nor of conspiracy to employ its enginery for special or local designs. At the South it has been vital and significant from the first, and it has grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln, in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile. Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole