In all the speeches delivered by the senators from the seceding States, there was no presentation of the grievances which, in their own minds, justified secession. This fact elicited less notice at the time than it calls forth in retrospect. Those senators held in their hands in the beginning, the fate of the secession movement. If they had advised the Southern States that it was wiser and better to abide in the Union, and at least to wait for some overt act of wrong against the slave States, the whole movement would have collapsed. But they evidently felt that this would be a shrinking and cowardly policy after the numerous manifestoes they had issued. South Carolina had taken the fatal step, and to fail in sustaining her would be to co-operate in crushing her. While these motives and aims are intelligible, it seems utterly incredible that not one of the senators gave a specification of the wrongs which led the South to her rash step. Mr. Toombs recounted the concessions on which the South would agree to remain; but these were new provisions and new conditions, never intended by the framers of the Federal Constitution; and they were abhorrent to the civilization of the nineteenth century. Mr. Toombs, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and Mr. Benjamin were the three ablest senators who spoke in favor of secession. Not one of them deemed it necessary to justify his conduct by a recital of the grounds on which so momentous a step could bear the test of historic examination. They dealt wholly in generalities as to the past, and apparently based their action on something that was to happen in the future. Mr. John Slidell sought to give a strong reason for the movement, in the statement that, if Lincoln should be inaugurated with Southern assent, the 4th of March would witness, in various quarters, outbreaks among the slaves which, although they would be promptly suppressed, would carry ruin and devastation to many a Southern home. It was from Mr. Slidell that Mr. Buchanan received the information which induced him to dwell at length in his annual message on this painful feature of the situation. But it was probably an invention of Mr. Slidell's fertile brain--imposed upon the President and intended to influence public sentiment in the North. It was in flat contradiction of the general faith in the personal fealty of their slaves, so constantly boasted by the Southern men,--a faith abundantly justified by the subsequent fact that four years of war passed without a single attempt to servile insurrection. At the time of the John Brown disturbance the South resented the imputation of fear, made upon it by the North. If now the danger was especially imminent, Southern leaders were solely to blame. They would not accept the honorable assurance of the Republican party and of the President-elect that no interference with slavery in the States was designed. They insisted in all their public addresses that Mr. Lincoln was determined to uproot