--The great controlling fact in our politics is this one, so little regarded not only by the general public, but by men in active political life--the thorough change which has taken place in our society and in the attitude of the people toward the Government. As a consequence of this change, political power has passed almost entirely out of the hands of the class of men to whom the framers of our Constitution intended to commit the administration of the Government which they called into being. It has fallen into those of men generally much inferior in cultivation and in position. And as we have already said, the very substance of the political constituency has changed. A suffrage practically universal and a controlling vote in one part of the country of emancipated negro slaves and in the other of uneducated foreign emigrants was not the political power to which Franklin, and Jefferson, and Hamilton and Adams, and their co-workers, supposed they were required to adapt their frame of government. And now no small part of our difficulty arises from the failure of a very large portion of our people, North as well as South, to perceive or at least fully to appreciate this change and its inevitable consequences. It is agreed by all students of political history, that the weakness of a written constitution lies in its inflexibility; and the error of many of our political managers lies in their failure to appreciate this truth and their assumption that the country is to be governed now just as it was in the days of Washington. But the fact is that such a condition of political affairs as now exists in South Carolina and in Louisiana would have been not only morally but physically impossible in the earlier years of the republic. "The people" in those States, and to a certain extent in all the States, but chiefly at the South, has not the same meaning that it had three-quarters of a century ago. Over the whole country the conditions of our political problem have changed; but most of all there; and the result is a strain upon our political institutions, and even upon our social institutions, which taxes their stability to the utmost. The present crisis is only inferior in its gravity to that which preceded the attempted secession; and now as then South Carolina takes the lead. But serious as the peril is, we shall pass through it safely. We did not emerge safely from the greater danger, to be overwhelmed by the less. Wisdom and firmness in the highest degree are demanded by the emergency; but wisdom and firmness will control it, and whatever measures may become necessary we may be sure that they will be fraught with no peril to our liberties, or to the stability of our Government. The nervous apprehension exhibited by some people that any grave political disturbance and consequent manifestation of power on the part of the central Government is likely to end in a usurpation, and an enslavement of the American people, may be surely characterized, if not as weak, at least as unwarranted. Think of it coolly for a moment, and see how absurd it is. Any man born and bred in the United States ought to be ashamed to entertain such a notion for a moment. If we look back through the long and weary years of our civil war, we shall find that mistakes were made on the side of the arbitrary exercise of power, from which a few individuals suffered; but indefensible as some of these were, according to the strict letter of the law, we can now see their real harmlessness to the public as clearly as we see the error of those who committed them. At no time have our liberties been in less peril than when the President of the United States had under his absolute command an army larger than that ever actually controlled by any monarch (fables and exaggerations allowed for), and when the warrant of the Secretary of War would have lodged any man in a Federal fortress. We see now the folly of the vaticinations against the endurance of our liberty which were uttered by many foreign wiseacres and some weak-kneed natives. Whatever may come of our present trouble, let us not forget the lessons of our recent experience. In spite of any bugaboo we shall remain a Federal republic and a free people.