16 FEBRUARY 1861, Page 14

THE PROGRESS OF DISUNION.

THE month of January has glided away without intelligence from America, save of the progress of secession. The fatal evil of the hour, the absence of men who are at once states- men and officials, becomes every day more apparent. In the North, where every career is open and every opinion for the moment tolerated, not one man has arisen to take the lead of opinion, and organize the masses on a policy either of compromise or resistance. In the South, the movement seems to be entrusted to men of the intellectual calibre of Governor Pickens, whose notion of statesmanship seems to be about that of an Irish Orangeman, or a French bishop. At Washington, where, if anywhere, one might hope to dis- cover some small residuum of administrative ability, states- manship seems to be confined to the concoction of unpalat- able compromises. Some dozen or two of these proposals have already been rejected, and the only one large enough to meet the emergency, Mr. Crittenden's, is swallowed with a bad grace by one side, and thrown up with a bad grace by the other. The politicians nominally at the helm seem divided into imbeciles and traitors. One Cabinet Minister resigns, because the President reinforces a Federal fort. Another boasts openly that his authority has been employed to place in the hands of the South the materials of a struggle. As to the President himself, we may give him the benefit of the doubt, and defend his honesty at the expense of his capacity for rule. But most assuredly no European despot, from the king who put the red bonnet on his head in 1787, to the king who to-day quits the kingdom he has at least stood fire to retain, ever showed weakness so pitiable as this chief of a Republic. From first to last he has been a tool in the hands of the agitators of the South. Had Colonel Fremont been chosen in 1856 instead of Mr. Buchanan, the Southern masses would have been taken by surprise. Choosing Mr. Buchanan, they secured, for four leers, the willing aid of a sympathetic executive in the work of providing against the possible con- tingency of Republican success. They obtained supplies of arms and ammunition, which were deposited in arsenals left without a guard, under the protection of forts half garri- soned, and, with rare exceptions, without magazines. Hence, when Mr. Lincoln was elected, the planting states not only se- ceded one after the other, but they seceded ready armed for any contest. Their allies at Washington comprised the whole Cabinet except General Scott, every one of the secretaries secretly and openly conspired to favour the South ; and when they had done their work, when the game was up, they strode out of the Cabinet to lead the insurrection. Mr. Buchanan has laboriously earned the painful distinction of being the last slave-President and President-slave of the United States ; and all that he can say in his own defence is the defence of silly women, "that he meant well." The 4th of March is near at hand ; Mr. Lincoln has by this time been proclaimed President-Elect ; six slave states are out of the Union, six other slave states preparing to go ; yet still people in England doubt whether the Union will be saved. Out of thirty-eight states, Mr. Lincoln will be chief of twenty-two, perhaps only of twenty, for Delaware and Maryland are still doubtful in the extreme. Over the rest he may claim some shadow of an authority, only to be sus- tained by an appeal to arms and a consequent civil war. It is, indeed, a strong illustration of the Conservative fibre in the British mind, this inability to believe in the fact that the dissolution of the American Union, so often pre- dicted by speculative writers, has actually come to pass. We suppose it is the multitude of projected compromises which bewilders the judgment. People think that out of these some raft of safety must be built, forgetting that the quarrel is radical, and that no compromise can touch the roots of a question. It is forgotten that the conflict now proceeding in all the glare of day, is no new thing, that it is a conflict of rival moral principles, as well as a conflict of rival political powers, that it has gone on in partial secrecy for forty years, slowly and painfully increasing in intensity, until the thin crust of political hypocrisy was rudely broken in 1850 and the two parties recognized each other across the chasm which separates the Slave from the Free. When blood was shed in Kansas under Mr. Pierce, and treachery was practised there under Mr. Buchanan, the first links of the Union were broken, never to be reunited except by force. The se- cession of the six states is only the logical consequence of the slave-owners determination not to be bound by the con- stitution except so long as the possession of power enabled them to define the obligation. For it should be borne in mind that although the nominal grievances of the South are what are termed violations of the constitution, the active reason for secession is an act perfectly in accordance with the constitu- tion, but an act depriving the South of power—the election of Mr. Lincoln. Union became impossible from the moment the South refused to accept the result of the working of the con- stitutional process of president-making. Unable to deny the validity of an election in which they took part, and which they endeavoured to win, they turn round and repudiate their alle- giance to the fundamental pact. This fact, which underlies the whole question, should be kept in sight by every one who attempts to estimate the probability of the adoption of some compromise. Not one of the six projects set forth in the journals can compromise Mr. Lincoln out of the presi- dential chair, or compromise South Carolina back again into the Union. Happily there will still be an United States of America, strong, powerful, and free, all the stronger and better for the loss of the Black South ; but the work of Washington and Franklin is undone—the United States of America have ceased to be.