The present civil war in the United States is the last frantic attempt of this dying feudal aristocracy to save itself from inevitable dissolution. The election of Mr. Lincoln as President of the United States, in 1860, by the vote of every Free State, was the announcement to the world that the people of the United States had finally and decisively conquered the feudal aristocracy of the republic after a civil contest of eighty years. With no weapons but those placed in their hands by the Constitution of the United States, the freemen of the republic had practically put this great slave aristocracy under their feet forever. That portion of the Union which was controlled by the will of the whole people had become so decidedly superior in every attribute of power and civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land. Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy. This great people was not plunged into civil war by unfriendly talking, or by the unfriendly legislation of the Northern people, or by the accidental election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Nations do not go to war for hard words or trifling acts of unfriendliness or accidental political changes; although these may be the ostensible causes of war--the sparks that finally explode the magazine. There was a real cause for this rebellion--_the peaceful, constitutional triumph of the people over the aristocracy of the republic, after a struggle of eighty years_. If ever a great oligarchy had good reason to fight, it was the Slave Power in 1860. It found itself defeated and condemned to a secondary position in the republic, with the assurance that its death was only a question of time. It is always a good cause of war to an aristocracy that its power is abridged; for an aristocracy cares only for itself, and honestly regards its own supremacy as the chief interest on earth. This Slave Power has only done what every such power has done since the foundation of the world. It has drawn the sword against the inevitable progress of mankind, and will be conquered by mankind. It is waging this terrible war, not against Northern Abolitionists, or the present Administration, _but against the United States census tables of 1860_; against the mighty realities of the progress of free society in the republic, which have startled us all; but with which no class of men were so well acquainted as Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates in rebellion.