their ears, what might they not do as a separate nation? But as a
part of the Union, they were too weak to hold their own if once
their political finesse should fail them. That day came upon them,
not unexpected, in 1860, and therefore they cut the cable.

And all this has come from slavery. It is hard enough, for how
could the South have escaped slavery? How, at least, could the
South have escaped slavery any time during these last thirty years?
And is it, moreover, so certain that slavery is an unmitigated evil,
opposed to God's will, and producing all the sorrows which have ever
been produced by tyranny and wrong? It is here, after all, that one
comes to the difficult question. Here is the knot which the fingers
of men cannot open, and which admits of no sudden cutting with the
knife. I have likened the slaveholding States to the drunken
husband, and in so doing have pronounced judgment against them. As
regards the state of the drunken man, his unfitness for partnership
with any decent, diligent, well-to-do wife, his ruined condition,
and shattered prospects, the simile, I think, holds good. But I
refrain from saying that as the fault was originally with the
drunkard in that he became such, so also has the fault been with the
slave States. At any rate I refrain from so saying here, on this
page. That the position of a slaveowner is terribly prejudicial,
not to the slave, of whom I do not here speak, but to the owner; of
so much at any rate I feel assured. That the position is therefore
criminal and damnable, I am not now disposed to take upon myself to
assert.

The question of slavery in America cannot be handled fully and
fairly by any one who is afraid to go back upon the subject, and
take its whole history since one man first claimed and exercised the