making a wicked use of that right. And here he advises us all not to venture on the folly of asserting the right of secession again, unless we wish all the smart people to think us as near to senility as Mr. Jefferson Davis. And every time he says his prayers he thanks God for not letting us succeed, although we were rescued from the crowning woe of success at the cost of the blood and anguish of hundreds and thousands of our noblest and best, because our Confederacy, when independent, would have been so miserable a failure. Our success would have been our ruin. So, Mr. Cable like a good child, thanks our conquerors for whipping the folly and naughtiness out of him, although with whips dipped in hell-fire. Still, after this, he can be as proud of having been a staunch Confederate as the rest of us.
Now, all this is as astonishing for its misapprehension of facts as for its confusion of reasoning. It was with peculiar pain that we saw a Southern man go out of his way to offer a gibe against Mr. Davis, a patriot, now in misfortune for having striven to defend our rights, a constitutional lawyer and statesman of masterly ability, whose history, if read, convinces every one capable of dispassionate understanding of his argument. Had Mr. Cable studied that history, with that capacity, he would have learned that the right he called a "quibble" was regarded as the grand bulwark of the people's liberty by the fathers of the country as much in the North as the South; was unquestionably left in possession of the States by their intent in Constitution, and has been asserted most seriously by every section and every school of politics in turn, as by Secession New England in 1814.
Mr. Cable is the first Southern man we have ever met with who seems not to have grasped the plain distinction between the occasion of an effect and its cause. He is the only Southern man we ever heard of who thought slavery was the cause of our resistance, all the rest, from the peasant up to the statesman, knew that slavery was but the circumstance of the attack, which furnished the incidental occasion of our resistance, while its moving cause was the desire to preserve a vital right to equality, and liberty for ourselves and our children. As we read Mr. Cable's astounding mistake, we wished that he had witnessed the clear definition of this plain distinction, which we saw given in the first public meeting we ever attended in the Confederacy, by a poor peasant youth little above a lout in intelligence. A captain of volunteers was asking for recruits one and another of the country youth were going forward to enroll them-
