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Secession an affair of the ballot-box, and not of the Bayonet.

It must certainly have become apparent to the dullest comprehension, that the Federal Government, at Washington, has proved an utter failure. It derived all the vigor it ever had from two sources alone, to wit : from the local support of the States and sections, and from the system of revenue which enabled it to levy immense contributions upon the people, in a manner imperceptible to the popular senses. A Government, however in trinsically weak, could always manifest an imposing front and an apparent vigor, while enjoying a revenue of sixty millions of dollars. So also could a Government, however feeble and frail in its organization, deport itself with the dignity of imperial majesty, and the authority of imperial power, while sustained by the loyal devotion of thirty sovereign States. But the moment one-half of these States began to distrust and oppose the Government at Washington, that moment did it lose one-half of its vitality. Nothing was then required to complete its paralysis, but the loss of its revenues; and these have been lost irrevocably.-- Not only would the secession of the exporting States of the Union, which furnished the staples of foreign commerce, have gradually overthrown a system of Federal revenues founded exclusively on impost duties, but, as if to hasten this result, and render its occurrence doubly sure, the Congress at Washington enacted a bill raising the duties to the highest protective point, and thus has driven the import trade of the country into the Southern ports, where it is allowed to enter under a very low revenue tariff. Such is the condition in which we find the Federal Government at Washington. With the good will of half the States lost, actually abandoned and defied by seven of them, and fallen into the hands of imbeciles, simpletons and fanatics, it presents a melancholy spectacle of feebleness, dilapidation, and decay.

On the other hand, we see a new Confederacy springing up at the South, strong in the very elements the loss of which has destroyed the elder one; strong in the loyal devotion of the people and States which are its constituents; strong in the unlimited resources of revenue and credit which it has at command. The sinews of vigor and power being lost to the old Government, it has nothing left but the forms of a defective Constitution to exert in its last struggles for existence, and the very exercise of these formal powers tends to hasten and complete its ruin. The new Government, on the other hand, feels that the putting forth its physical powers would vastly strengthen its popularity and bring the affairs of its rival to a crisis. Its new Constitution, moreover, gives it infinitely the advantage of its adversary, amended, renewed and invigorated, as that instrument is, expressly to obviate the very defects which have sapped the foundations of the old structure. The difference between the two Governments is the difference between January and May; between the infirmity and decrepitude of age, and the growing power and buoyant vitality of youth.

One would think that a great and wise community like Virginia, traduced, reviled, and insulted as she has been for thirty years by the Northern section, would, with eager alacrity, make common cause with her sisters of the South; that she would do this even if the measure threatened grievous privations and heavy material losses, such as she cheerfully encountered in the Revolution. But when it is plain that the losses and material injury would result from adhering to her present hateful association, and that the highest pecuniary and commercial advantages would follow from her forming a proper, natural, and congenial alliance with the Southern Confederacy, her delay to take the step seems as inexplicable as it is injurious to her fortunes and her fame.

The block and chain which confines her in Lincoln's yard, is the Convention now in session in this city; and this body was elected before the people were fully alive to the real nature of the crisis that was upon the country. They were restrained from voting for secession from the natural aversion felt by all conservative communities to sudden and radical political change. The great mass of voters naturally shrank from the horrors of civil war, then thought to be the necessary attendant of secession. The secession movement, moreover, was then in chaos, and had not yet developed itself, as it has done since, in a regularly and peacefully organized Government, amply provided with arms, and surrounded with the full equipments of complete political organization. Never before, in the history of the world, did a Government spring so suddenly into existence, and possess itself with the means of independence, at so little cost of blood, and of public debt and treasure, as did that of the Southern Confederacy. It has demonstrated to the doubting and fearing Border States that secession is not a thing of wars and death struggles, but is a mere affair of pen, ink, and paper.-- Government on this continent is founded alone upon the consent of the governed, and is habitually treated as a necessary evil, from which the governed may withdraw whenever the evil counterbalances the good attending it, and whenever a change of government promises a diminution of the necessary evil. It would be contrary to the genius of American politics to hold unwilling States by force to an obnoxious alliance. Virginia, therefore, has but to will her separation from the North, and the separation is accomplished, without the firing of a gun or the cost of a dollar. It is a mere matter of taste and choice, and not a matter of physical ability and power, with a raw head and bloody bones in the way, to frighten her from her propriety. It is a mere question of the ballot-box, the mere casting of a vote, in which the opposing candidates are the North, advocating a system of politics which she has spent her lifetime in opposing, and the South, who have established a system of polities for which she has spent a lifetime in contending. Can she hesitate or falter much longer on such a question ?

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