Our only hope lies in our possibly being in the wrong, and in magnanimously changing our views and feelings, and our behavior.

This, upon conviction, it will be most noble to do for its own sake, leaving the effect of it to Him by whom actions are weighed, and to those who, we shall have concluded, are naturally as magnanimous and just as we, and who, if guilty of oppression, were liable to the very same accusation when we first confederated with them, and when Northern slave-importers put their hands with Southern slave-holders to the Declaration of Independence, both averring that all men are created free and equal.
"We seem now to have concluded that we have put ourselves entirely right, and that our Southern brethren are entirely wrong." "I cannot feel," said Mr.North, "that we are to blame for having our opinions, and for expressing them honestly and fearlessly.

What more have we done ?" I replied, "They say that we have held them up to universal execration; that we have quoted, with readiness, the testimony of foreign nations against them,--of nations who know nothing of domestic slavery like ours, mixed up with the qualifying influences of our own civilization; that our imaginative literature has made them odious, associating cruelty and vulgarity with the relation of slave-holding; that we have labored to cripple their Institution, hoping to destroy it; that we have striven to save the District of Columbia from their system as from corruption; that a thousand millions of dollars of their property we have treated as contraband, and have made it perilous for them to recover it; that we have lain in wait and molested them in their transit through our borders, with their servants, to embark for sea.

We dispute their right to go with their servants into territories jointly acquired, and belonging by constitutional right equally to them as to ourselves.
This, they say, has not been a just and sincere demand for an equitable division of territory in view of the naturally conflicting interests of slave labor and free, but rather a vindictive determination to hem in the slave-holder, to force the scorpion into fires where he shall die of his own sting, or,--to borrow the metaphor, with the language, of a present Senator from Massachusetts,--where the 'poisoned rat shall die in his own hole.' "Two confederacies or one, our prospect is fearful if we continue to feel and act toward each other after this temper, and to cherish our respective grievances." "There is another side to all this," said Mr.North.

"I ascribe the excitement at the South to the loss on their part of political power, or to a grasping spirit which breaks compromises, and which requires that the national legislation be always shaped in its favor." "But," said I, "if we can trust the convictions of just men, in private life, at the South,--men removed from all suspicion as to the purity of their motives,--it is certain that our Northern feelings toward slave-holders, and the expressions of those feelings in ways which have been applauded among us for many years, are the real causes of the irritation and exasperation which have brought us to the present brink.
"Now, as these two sections must continue to exist, side by side, they will go on to repel each other until either slavery ceases, or a change of feeling takes place in the non-slaveholding section.