Rather nettled by his manner, I quickly responded: "Undoubtedly they will, sir. They have fought before, and it would not be wise to count them cowards."
A true gentleman, he at once saw that his manner had given offence, and instantly moderating his tone, rather apologetically replied: "Not cowards, sir, but too much absorbed in the 'occupations of peace,' to go to war for an idea."
"But what you call an 'idea,'" said our host, "they may think a great fact on which their existence depends. I can see that we will lose vastly by even a peaceful separation. Tell me, Colonel, what we will gain?"
"Gain!" warmly responded the guest. "Everything! Security, freedom, room for the development of our institutions, and each progress in wealth as the world has never seen."
"All that is very fine," rejoined the "Captain," "but where there is wealth, there must be work; and who will do the work in your new Empire—I do not mean the agricultural labor; you will depend for that, of coarse, on the blacks—but who will run your manufactories and do your mechanical labor? The Southern gentleman would feel degraded by such occupation; and if you put the black to any work requiring intelligence, you must let him think, and when he THINKS, he is free!"
"All that is easily provided for," replied the Secessionist. "We shall form intimate relations with England. She must have our cotton, and we in return will take her manufactures."
"That would be all very well at present, and so long as you should keep on good terms with her; but suppose, some fine morning, Exeter Hall got control of the English Government, and hinted to you, in John Bull fashion, that cotton produced by free labor would be more acceptable, what could three, or even eight millions, cut off from the sympathy and support of the North, do in opposition to the power of the British empire?"
"Nothing, perhaps, if we were three or even eight millions, but we shall be neither one nor the other. Mexico and Cuba are ready, now, to fall into our hands, and before two years have passed, with or without the Border States, we shall count twenty millions. Long before England is abolitionized, our population will outnumber hers, and our territory extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and as far south as the Isthmus. We are founding, sir, an empire that will be able to defy all Europe—one grander than the world has seen since the age of Pericles!"
"You say, with or without the Border States," remarked our host. "I thought you counted on their support."
"We do if the North makes war upon us, but if allowed to go in peace, we can do better without them. They will be a wall between us and the abolitionized North."