Such have been the leading events of the controversy between the North and the South during the last forty years. Throughout the greater part, and especially throughout the latter part of it, the South have had, beyond all comparison, the larger share of the influence and power of the Union. Every successive President, for many years past, has more or less represented Southern views. The whole course of Federal legislation has been in the interests of the South. The foreign policy of the Union, especially its American policy, has been usually dictated principally by their wish to add new slave States to the Union; and even the decrees of the Supreme Court have not been free from traces of Southern influence. Many circumstances have contributed to put the South in this position; the most remarkable being the comparatively small number and superior adroitness of the Southern planters, who have much greater political aptitude and more independence than the Northern statesmen—the simplicity and directness of their political objects—and, above all, their comparative indifference to the maintenance of the Union. Though they have enjoyed to the utmost all the advantages which the Union had to give—though they have directed its policy, forced the Northern States, in the case of the Fugitive Slave Law, to discharge humiliating functions for them, and gone far towards effecting the object, to borrow a well-known expression, of “making slavery national and freedom sectional,” they care far less about the Union than the Northerners. They enjoy over them all the advantages which a simple society has over one which is at once wealthy, ambitious, and complex. The planter’s pursuits are so simple that the considerations which influence other Americans affect him but slightly. Whatever becomes of the rest of the Union, he can grow and sell his cotton, so long as he has slaves and customers. He cares, and has reason to care, comparatively little for the enterprises which excite a passionate enthusiasm amongst the Northerners, and which tend to the conversion of the whole continent, in the shortest possible space of time, into one enormous hive of moderate comfort. To the North, the dissolution of the Union means the establishment of internal frontiers, the destruction of the Federal jurisdiction, and with it a severe shock to all sorts of commercial enterprises, the opening of fruitful sources of jealousy, and the diminution of the external prestige of the nation. To the South it means nothing very formidable. As secession would be their act, and not that of their rivals, it would not hurt, but rather flatter, their national pride. They would have it in their power to reopen the slave trade; and as their internal enterprises are few, in comparison with those of the North, they would care comparatively little for the destruction of the Federal jurisdiction. These circumstances have enabled the Southerners for years to hold the