whether their spirit, their patience, and the sacrifices they are
willing to make, will be exhausted before reaching it, I cannot tell.
They may, in the end, be wearied into recognizing the separation. But
to those who say that because this may have to be done at last, it
ought to have been done at first, I put the very serious question--On
what terms? Have they ever considered what would have been the meaning
of separation if it had been assented to by the Northern States when
first demanded? People talk as if separation meant nothing more than
the independence of the seceding States. To have accepted it under
that limitation would have been, on the part of the South, to give up
that which they have seceded expressly to preserve. Separation, with
them, means at least half the Territories; including the Mexican
border, and the consequent power of invading and overrunning Spanish
America for the purpose of planting there the "peculiar institution"
which even Mexican civilization has found too bad to be endured. There
is no knowing to what point of degradation a country may be driven in
a desperate state of its affairs; but if the North _ever_, unless on
the brink of actual ruin, makes peace with the South, giving up the
original cause of quarrel, the freedom of the Territories; if it
resigns to them when out of the Union that power of evil which it
would not grant to retain them in the Union--it will incur the pity
and disdain of posterity. And no one can suppose that the South would
have consented, or in their present temper ever will consent, to an
accommodation on any other terms. It will require a succession of
humiliation to bring them to that. The necessity of reconciling
themselves to the confinement of slavery within its existing
boundaries, with the natural consequence, immediate mitigation of
slavery, and ultimate emancipation, is a lesson which they are in no
mood to learn from anything but disaster. Two or three defeats in the
field, breaking their military strength, though not followed by an