“We must act now and decisively.... If we do not act now, we deliberately consign, not our posterity, but our children to the flames. What a holocaust for us to place upon the alter of that union for which the South and West have had such a bigoted and superstitious veneration.”[134] The brilliant follower had passed quite beyond his leader. The orator who eight years later defiantly declared in the United States Senate, “Cotton is King,” tersely states in this letter his political creed, viz., that: “The fundamental object of government is to secure the fruits of labor and skill—that is to say property, and that its forms must be moulded upon the social organizations. Life and liberty will then be secured, for these are naturally under the guardianship of society and that civilization which is the fruit of its progress. ‘Free government’ and all that sort of thing has been, I think, a fatal delusion and humbug from the time of Moses. Freedom does not spring from government, but from the same soil which produces government itself, and all that we want from that is a guarantee for property fairly acquired.”[135] His conclusion was: “If leaders will only lead, neither they nor we have anything to fear.” Property is said to be proverbially timid, and the powers of finance to dread war and its confusion; but Hammond’s conclusion was identical with that if the greatest banker of Charleston, of that day, who in the previous year had informed Calhoun after an extended journey, that the South was “ready to act.”[136]