To his native State Judge Black was devotedly attached. He inherited the blood of two strong elements of its population,--the German and the Scotch-Irish,--and he united the best characteristics of both in his own person. He had always looked upon Pennsylvania as the guardian of the Federal Union, almost as the guarantor of its safety and its perpetuity. He spoke of her as the break-water that protected the slave States from the waves of radicalism which were threatening to ingulf Southern institutions. The success of the Republican party in 1860 he regarded as a portent of direst evil, --indeed, as a present disaster, immeasurably sorrowful. The excitement in the Southern States over the probability of Mr. Lincoln's election he considered natural, their serious protest altogether justifiable. He desired the free States to be awakened to the gravity of the situation, to be thoroughly alarmed, and to repent of their sins against the South. He wished it understood from ocean to ocean that the position of the Republican party was inconsistent with loyalty to the Union, and that its permanent success would lead to the destruction of the government. It was not unnatural that with these extreme views he should be carried beyond the bounds of prudence, and that, in his headlong desire to rebuke the Republican party as enemies of the Union, he should aid in precipitating a dissolution of the government before the Republicans could enter upon its administration. He thus became in large degree responsible for the unsound position and the dangerous teachings of Mr. Buchanan. In truth some of the worst doctrines embodied in the President's evil message came directly from an opinion given by Judge Black as Attorney-General, and, made by Mr. Buchanan still more odious and more dangerous by the quotation of a part and not the whole.