States openly throw off all allegiance to the Federal Union, do not even profess to be willing to come back upon any terms, and then such conditions are proposed by the other slaveholding States as leads to the repudiation of the Constitution in its whole spirit and import upon the subject of slavery.  The alternative, in reality, is either civil war or the surrender of the Constitution into the hands of pro-slavery men to be molded just as it may suit their convenience.  The price they ask for peace is simply the liberty to have their own way, and that the majority should be willing to submit to the minority.  They aim for a reconstruction of the Union that shall incorporate the Dred Scott decision into the whole policy of the Government and make slavery the supreme power of the country, and all other interests subservient to it.  The North has its choice of two evils—­unconditional and unqualified submission to the demands of slavery, or civil war.  It is expected, since the country has yielded step by step to the exactions of slavery ever since the Government was instituted, that the free States will keep on yielding until the South has nothing more to ask for, and the North has nothing more to give.  With such a servile compliance, the free States are assured that they will have no difficulty in keeping the peace.  But the question to be decided is:  Is such a kind of peace worth the price demanded for it?  May it not be true that great as is the evil of civil war, it is less an evil than an unresisting acquiescence to the exactions of slavery, and the admission that any State that pleases can leave the Union?  The theory of secession involves, if admitted, a greater disaster to the Federal Union than even the slow eating at its vitals of the cancer of slavery.  National unity, one country, the sovereignty of the Constitution, are all sacrificed by secession.  It involves in it either the worst anarchy or the worst despotism.  United, the States can stand, and command the respect of the world, but secession is an enemy to the country, the most cruel.  Rev. Dr. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, most forcibly says: 

’Every man who has any remaining loyalty to the nation, or any hope and desire for the restoration of the seceding States to the Confederacy, must see that what is meant by the outcry against coercion is in the interest, of secession, and that what is meant is, in effect, that the Federal Government must be terrified or seduced into complete cooeperation with the revolution which it was its most binding duty to have used all its power and influence to prevent.’

Jefferson Davis, in his late message, says:  ’Let us alone, let us go, and the sword drops from our hands.’  But what does this involve?  The admission of the right of secession, which, as has been proved, is fatal to all national unity and preservation.  Even if this arrogant demand was complied with, would peace be thus possible?  Would not the breaking up of the Union involve the people