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 healed until it had run its course.  The doctrine of “the irrepressible conflict” had been taught too long, and accepted too widely and earnestly, to die out until it should culminate in secession and disunion, and, if coercion were resorted to, then in civil war.  I believed from the first that it was the purpose of some of the apostles of that doctrine to force a collision between the North and the South, either to bring about a separation or to find a vain but bloody pretext for abolishing slavery in the States.  In any event, I knew, or thought I knew, that the end was certain collision and death to the Union.

Believing thus, I have for years past denounced those who taught that doctrine, with all the vehemence, the bitterness, if you choose—­I thought it a righteous, a patriotic bitterness—­of an earnest and impassioned nature. * * * But the people did not believe me, nor those older and wiser and greater than I. They rejected the prophecy, and stoned the prophets.  The candidate of the Republican party was chosen President.  Secession began.  Civil war was imminent.  It was no petty insurrection, no temporary combination to obstruct the execution of the laws in certain States, but a revolution, systematic, deliberate, determined, and with the consent of a majority of the people of each State which seceded.  Causeless it may have been, wicked it may have been, but there it was—­not to be railed at, still less to be laughed at, but to be dealt with by statesmen as a fact.  No display of vigor or force alone, however sudden or great, could have arrested it even at the outset.  It was disunion at last.  The wolf had come, but civil war had not yet followed.  In my deliberate and solemn judgment there was but one wise and masterly mode of dealing with it.  Non-coercion would avert civil war, and compromise crush out both abolitionism and secession.  The parent and the child would thus both perish.  But a resort to force would at once precipitate war, hasten secession, extend disunion, and while it lasted utterly cut off all hope of compromise.  I believed that war, if long enough continued, would be final, eternal disunion.  I said it; I meant it; and accordingly, to the utmost of my ability and influence, I exerted myself in behalf of the policy of non-coercion.  It was adopted by Mr. Buchanan’s administration,