they could bring themselves to adopt on the subject of slavery the ideas of their opponents—­then the war might have been avoided, and secession also avoided.  I do believe that had Mr. Lincoln at that time submitted himself to a compromise in favor of the Democrats, promising the support of the government to certain acts which would in fact have been in favor of slavery, South Carolina would again have been foiled for the time.  For it must be understood, that though South Carolina and the Gulf States might have accepted certain compromises, they would not have been satisfied in so accepting them.  The desired secession, and nothing short of secession, would in truth have been acceptable to them.  But in doing so Mr. Lincoln would have been the most dishonest politician even in America.  The North would have been in arms against him; and any true spirit of agreement between the cotton-growing slave States and the manufacturing States of the North, or the agricultural States of the West, would have been as far off and as improbable as it is now.  Mr. Crittenden, who proffered his compromise to the Senate in December, 1860, was at that time one of the two Senators from Kentucky, a slave State.  He now sits in the Lower House of Congress as a member from the same State.  Kentucky is one of those border States which has found it impossible to secede, and almost equally impossible to remain in the Union.  It is one of the States into which it was most probable that the war would be carried—­Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri being the three States which have suffered the most in this way.  Of Mr. Crittenden’s own family, some have gone with secession and some with the Union.  His name had been honorably connected with American politics for nearly forty years, and it is not surprising that he should have desired a compromise.  His terms were in fact these—­a return to the Missouri compromise, under which the Union pledged itself that no slavery should exist north of 36.30 degrees N. lat., unless where it had so existed prior to the date of that compromise; a pledge that Congress would not interfere with slavery in the individual States—­which under the Constitution it cannot do; and a pledge that the Fugitive Slave Law should be carried out by the Northern States.  Such a compromise might seem to make very small demand on the forbearance of the Republican party, which was now dominant.  The repeal of the Missouri compromise had been to them a loss, and it might be said that its re-enactment would be a gain.  But since that compromise had been repealed, vast territories south of the line in question had been added to the union, and the re-enactment of that compromise would hand those vast regions over to absolute slavery, as had been done with Texas.  This might be all very well for Mr. Crittenden in the slave State of Kentucky—­for Mr. Crittenden, although a slave owner, desired to perpetuate the Union; but it would not have been well for New England or for the