English cruisers. As for the American cruisers, Mr. Buchanan had taken
care to remove them all from Cuba, where every one knows that the living
cargoes are landed. The slave trade is therefore in the height of
prosperity, whatever the last presidential message may say of it, and as
to the application of the laws concerning piracy, I do not see that they
have had many victims.

We can now measure the perils which menaced the United States. It was
not such or such a measure in particular, but a collection of measures,
all directed towards the same end, and tending mutually to complete each
other: conquests, the domestic and the foreign slave trade, the
overthrow of the few barriers opposed to the extension of slavery, the
debasement of institutions, the definitive enthroning of an adventurous
policy, a policy without principles and without scruples; to this the
country was advancing with rapid strides. Do they who raise their hands
and eyes to heaven, because the election of Mr. Lincoln has caused the
breaking forth of an inevitable crisis, fancy then that the crisis would
have been less serious if it had broken forth four years later, when the
evil would have been without remedy? Already, the five hundred thousand
slaves of the last century have given place to four millions; was it
advisable to wait until there were twenty millions, and until vast
territories, absorbed by American power, had been peopled by blacks torn
from Africa? Was it advisable to await the time when the South should
have become decidedly the most important part of the Confederation, and
when the North, forced to secede, should have left to others the name,
the prestige, the flag of the United States? Do they fancy that, by
chance, with the supremacy of the South, with its conquests, with the
monstrous development of its slavery, secession would have been avoided?
No! it would have appeared some day as a necessary fact; only it would
have been accomplished under different auspices and in different