I separation of North and South than they ever were before. take for granted that Buchanan will win. The Southern States are thoroughly in earnest. They are fighting for their property. The Northern States have only a principle at stake; they will be less united and less eager. At the same time it is not at all clear that they can continue to form one State, or rather one political body; and they may reach a point when, like a married couple who cannot agree, they may part by common consent. Each may find his account in a separation. At a much later time (May 15, 1861), he wrote as follows: The Northern States have drifted or rather plunged into war without having any intelligible aim or policy. The South fight for independence; but what do the North fight for, except to gratify passions and pride? in his curious letter talks of averting anarchy, but if the North had remained quiet they had nothing to fear from anarchy. In an earlier letter of the same year, before the war had broken out, he said: The refusal of Tennessee and Arkansas to join the new confederacy may give some hopes of a compromise, but I cannot see how men who have committed themselves so far as the leaders of the Secession movement, can be expected to come back except upon such terms as they themselves would dictate. They would not only lose their present position, but they would scarcely be safe from proscription, if they acquiesced in the re-establishment of the old Union, and thus to a certain extent put themselves in the power of a republican executive. With these extracts I must close this preface, which contains a most imperfect record of Sir George Lewis's personal qualities and merits, written by one who had full opportunity of knowing them, and who lives to lament a loss which can never be supplied. His literary labours speak for themselves in his published works, and the small specimen contained in the following pages is offered to the general reader only as a sample of their excellence. E. W. H. |