have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from these causes."
In 1861 all the plans proposed to restrain the majority had failed. The dangers which had been described as belonging to the condition we were in had to be met. The South, by her representatives in the two houses of Congress, tried, by select committees, to find some possible means of giving security to the Southern States short of adopting the last resort, secession.
The committee of the Senate organized in January, 1861, of which the writer of this article was a member, sought diligently to find some basis of adjustment on which a majority of the members representing the three political divisions of the Senate could agree. These divisions were known as the Radicals of the North, the Conservatives of the Middle States, and the Ultras of the South. The venerable Senator of Kentucky, Mr. Crittenden, had offered the resolutions which were referred to the committee. Mr. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, after the failure of the committee to agree upon anything, called the attention of the Senate to the fact that it was not the Southern members, naming particularly Toombs and Davis, who obstructed measures for pacification, but the Northern men, who had objected to everything, and on whom he then called for a statement of what they proposed to do, to which no answer was made. Exulting in the result of their recent election, feeling power and forgetting right, they yet dared not avow the evil purpose which they contemplated. One State had already withdrawn from the Union, and events in others were moving with accelerated velocity to the same conclusion; yet the men who were soon to be most vociferous in declarations of love for the Union were silent when words might have been effectual to save it. It had been but a few years since a hearing had been refused to abolitionist lecturers in New England; but now the eminent orator, Wendell Phillips, exulting in the terrible faction which was ruling in the North, said: "It does not know its own face and calls itself national; but it is not national—it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North, pledged against the South."
Mr. Seward, he of the irrepressible conflict, who was regarded as the power behind the throne of the incoming administration, was a member of the committee above referred to;
