beginning of time, have been its fruits. The spirit of non-intervention
is the very spirit of peace and concord. * * *

The spirit of intervention assumed the form of abolitionism because
slavery was odious in name and by association to the Northern mind,
and because it was that which most obviously marks the different
civilizations of the two sections. The South herself, in her early and
later efforts to rid herself of it, had exposed the weak and offensive
parts of slavery to the world. Abolition intermeddling taught her
at last to search for and defend the assumed social, economic, and
political merit and values of the institution. But there never was an
hour from the beginning when it did not seem to me as clear as the sun
at broad noon that the agitation in any form in the North and West of
the slavery question must sooner or later end in disunion and civil war.
This was the opinion and prediction for years of Whig and Democratic
statesmen alike; and, after the unfortunate dissolution of the Whig
party in 1854, and the organization of the present Republican party upon
the exclusive antislavery and sectional basis, the event was inevitable,
because, in the then existing temper of the public mind, and after
the education through the press and the pulpit, the lecture and the
political canvass, for twenty years, of a generation taught to hate
slavery and the South, the success of that party, possessed as it was
of every engine of political, business, social, and religious influence,
was certain. It was only a question of time, and short time. Such
was its strength, indeed, that I do not believe that the union of the
Democratic party in 1860 on any candidate, even though he had been
supported also by the entire so-called conservative or anti-Lincoln vote
of the country, would have availed to defeat it; and, if it had, the
success of the Abolition party would only have been postponed four years
longer. The disease had fastened too strongly upon the system to be