The American Constitution is now, I think, at the crisis of its severest trial. I conceive it to be by no means perfect, even for the wants of the people who use it; and I have already endeavored to explain what changes it seems to need. And it has had this defect--that it has permitted a falling away from its intended modes of action, while its letter has been kept sacred. As I have endeavored to show, universal suffrage and democratic action in the Senate were not intended by the framers of the Constitution. In this respect the Constitution has, as it were, fallen through, and it is needed that its very beams should be restrengthened. There are also other matters as to which it seems that some change is indispensable. So much I have admitted. But, not the less, judging of it by the entirety of the work that it has done, I think that we are bound to own that it has been successful.
And now, with regard to this tedious war, of which from day to day we are still, in this month of May, 1862, hearing details which teach us to think that it can hardly as yet be near its end. To what may we rationally look as its result? Of one thing I myself feel tolerably certain, that its result will not be nothing, as some among us have seemed to suppose may be probable. I cannot believe that all this energy on the part of the North will be of no avail, more than I suppose that Southern perseverance will be of no avail.
There are those among us who say that a secession will at last be accomplished; the North should have yielded to the South at once, and that nothing will be gained by their great expenditure of life and treasure. I can by no means bring myself to agree with these.
I also look to the establishment of secession. Seeing how essential and thorough are the points of variance between the North and the South, how unlike the one people is to the other, and how necessary it is that their policies should be different; seeing how deep are their antipathies, and how fixed is each side in the belief of its own rectitude and in the belief also of the other's political baseness, I can not believe that the really Southern States will ever again be joined in amicable union with those of the North.