There are certain theories in regard to the causes of the present war, which are so generally accepted as to have fortified themselves strongly in the principle of '_magna est veritas_ et prevalebit.' Theories based, however, upon facts which have taken their rise long since the true causes of the war had begun to work, and which, consequently, mistaking the effect for the cause, are from their nature ephemeral, and farther from the truth than they were at their origin. Few thinkers have looked below the surface of the matter, and the majority of Christendom, ignoring any other past than the few brief years that have rolled over our national existence, forgetting that great causes oft-times smoulder unseen for centuries ere they burst forth in effects the more powerful from their long suppression, shaking the earth with the pent-up fury of ages--forgetting these things and arguing in the present instance from the few palpable facts found floating upon the surface of our society, by a tacit consent lay the burden of the war upon the present generation and its immediate predecessors. Herein lies the error which blinds the world as well to the warning of the past as to the momentous issue involved. Where then shall we look for the cause of that antagonism in which North and South are arrayed--that bitter hostility setting brother against brother, and father against child, dividing into two separate portions a nation descended from the same stock, whose archives are one, all whose associations of a glorious past are the same, and which has hitherto swept swiftly on to unparalleled wealth and power, seemingly indissolubly united, and looking forward to the same glorious and ever-expanding future? Not to the errors in our political system, for no faults of government could, in a brief century, have produced such an upheaving of the foundations of society as we now behold--could have awakened such a thunder peal as is now causing the uttermost corners of the earth to tremble with dismay. Not to the institution of slavery, for however great a curse it maybe to our people and soil, however brutalizing in its tendencies, however unjust to the negro race, and opposed to all the principles of enlightenment and human progress--of whatever crimes it may have been guilty, this last and greatest of crimes cannot be laid at its door: for the bitterness of feeling between North and South existed long before the agitation of slavery was dreamed of, and the latter has only been seized upon as the ready means of accomplishing a greater design. Finally, not to any supposed desire in the Southern mind of establishing an independent empire of the South, whose people should be homogeneous, whose individual interests identical, and whose climate, productions, and institutions should move on in undisturbed harmony forever. For to this last a motive is wanting. Under no government that the world has ever known could the South have