Candid investigation will demonstrate the fact that Davis, among Southern statesmen, was an almost solitary exception in his rejection of the dominant sentiment of the times. The remarkable consistency of his public life is in no respect better sustained than in his oft-repeated apprehensions of eventual war between the sections. His dread of disunion arose from his dread of civil war, and the latter he always urged to be the necessary consequence of the former. Striving to save the Union upon a just and constitutional basis, he yet habitually admonished the South of the inevitable result of disunion, and coupled his admonitions with earnest exhortations of thorough preparation for the most serious emergency in its history. His speeches, addresses, and letters, furnish irrefutable testimony of his apprehension of civil war as an inevitable concomitant of disunion. _Not one line, or one sentence, written or uttered by him in the entire period of his public career, can be so construed as to indicate a different conviction._ Believing that he foresaw the impending conflict, he strove with indefatigable energy and incomparable ability, in company with Calhoun, in 1850, to place the South in a position which would then have rescued her liberties. If the warning voice of the South, proclaiming the inexorable decree of disunion, unless her constitutional rights were fully and forever secured, had then been disregarded, at least her _resistance_ must have been more effectual than it could become by postponement. In innumerable passages of rare eloquence, he has left an imperishable record of patriotic devotion to a constitutional union, and touching proofs of the emotion with which he contemplated the evils which were to follow its destruction. The words of his farewell address to the Senate, ("putting our trust in God, and in our firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may") do not more clearly indicate the calm determination with which he would meet the peril, than his appreciation of its serious nature.