MR. EDITOR:--- Amid the storm of revolution, governments are apt to forget the principles to secure which they were instituted, and by which they should be controlled.  All history admonishes us of this truth.  We should take warning from the past, and see to it that the storm of war is so directed as to secure and not destroy the objects for which it was inaugurated.  An inquiry into the cause of Secession, and the desolating war that has followed, is especially germain to the important subject under consideration.  The rivers of blood in which our country has been baptized, the many wives that have been made widows, and the numberless orphans, lend to this inquiry a solemn and imposing interest.

     To all tolerably familiar with the history of the slavery agitation in the old Union, the fact must be apparent, that Slavery---aggressions upon it by the North, apprehensions for its safety in the South---was alike the mediate and immediate cause of Secession.  It alone gave significancy to republican or democratic triumph.  It alone rendered the election of Lincoln threatening.  From the foundation of the government, it antagonized the two sections now arrayed in war against each other. All other questions were subordinated to it.  It was made the touchstone of political soundness.  The great democratic party was broken up because the Southern delegates to the Charleston Convention were unwilling to have mooted questions connected with slavery in the territories, even, adjudicated and settled by the Supreme Court of the United States.  The election of Mr. Lincoln on a platform hostile to the existence of slavery in the territories, was deemed by the South sufficient cause to secede from the Union, and incur, if need be, the perils and desolations of war.  At this peculiar juncture, when so many of our people seem disposed to cast away the faith of their fathers, it would be interesting and profitable, perhaps, to enter more minutely into the details of the slavery agitation and show how essentially and inexorably it is connected with the present struggle.

    But it would transcend the proposed limits of this article, and indeed, with all candid, well informed minds, it must a work of supererogation. It should be constantly kept in view, through all the bloody phases and terrible epochs of this relentless war, that slavery was the casus belli---that the principle of State Sovereignty, and its sequence, the right of secession, were important to the South principally, or solely, as the armor that encased her peculiar institution---and that every life that has been lost in this struggle was an offering upon the altar of African Slavery.  In the light of this great and solemn truth, is it not a matter of wonder and astonishment, that Southern men should gravely propose to arm, and as a necessary consequence, emancipate all the able-bodied slaves in the Confederacy, or a large portion of them, thereby striking an irretrievable and fatal blow at the institution.---The adoption of this policy would be foul wrong to our departed heroes who have fallen in its defense.  The compulsory adoption of such a policy would be tantamount to defeat; for what else is the forced assimilation of our institutions to those of the North but the abandonment of the whole object of the war?

    2. The proposition that Congress should pass an act placing all the able bodied negroes, or any of them in the field, and then emancipating them, illustrates the facility with which revolutions hurry men away from the landmarks of their political faith.---"That each State should regulate its own domestic institution in its own way," is, and ever has been, the imperial principle of Southern politics.  Even the Republican party, prior to secession, dared not assail this principle.  All that Mr. Lincoln's platform did was to oppose its application to the territories.  He disclaimed any intention to interfere with slavery in the States.  It is only since the war, that, together with other flagrant infractions of the Constitution, he has ventured to interfere with the domestic institutions of States.  In the old government it was well understood that Congress had no right to legislate upon the subject of slavery in the States, and we "resisted even to the disruption of every tie that bound us to the Union," when it was proposed to apply such legislation to the territories.  With what consistency then, can the Confederate Government outstrip the North in its onslaught upon the domestic institutions of States?  All such legislation is without warrant in the constitution, and involves the abandonment of all principle.

    3d.  The Government has no right, and it assuredly can have no disposition, to impress and emancipate able-bodied slaves without compensation to their owners.  It is supposed that we have not progressed sufficiently far in our emancipation tendencies to forget that slaves are the private property of their masters, and it is a well established principle of law that private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation.  Providing any thing like fair compensation to owners for the able-bodied slaves of the Confederacy would fatally embarrass the finances of the country.  It would require the payment of from $4000 to $5000 for each recruit---a price, it is believed, unparalalled in the annals of war.

    4th.  What is to be the status of these freed negroes after the war? It is a question which should be met and settled before it is practically sprung upon the people.  If they are to be emancipated, of course they are to be invested with all the immunities of freedom---including the elective franchise, the right to hold land, inherit and transmit property and all the privileges of citizenship.  They are to have seats in public assemblies and fashionable gatherings by the side of Southern ladies and gentlemen.  Individual delicacy and self-respect are to be our only preventives from miscegination.  Are the people prepared for such a state of things?  If not, they should by careful how they commit themselves to a policy necessarily eventuating in it.

    It has been suggested that we colonise them.---For arguments against colonization, it is only necessary to refer to the arguments of Southern philosophers and statesmen for the past thirty years.

    5th.  Our view upon this subject is painfully impresive.  Some of us have fathers, brothers, sons and friends who for months, some of them for years, have endured the extremity of Yankee insolence and cruelty. Why?  Because our Government, faithful to the principles upon which it entered this contest, held the negro to be a degraded race and refused to recognize the right of the North to make soldiers of them.  Not only did it ostracise our own negroes who had been freed by the Yankees and placed in their armies, but the free negroes of the North also. This was consistent, manly and right.  Our incarcerated heroes recognizedand sanctioned it.  They cheerfully bore the hardships, privations and sufferings of a lonely and cruel imprisonment rather than have their government abandon principle.  But what would be their astonishment and dismay to find that the principles for which they had suffered so much and so long, had been abandoned by their government---that their comrades who had sunk beneath the accumulated insults and tortures of imprisonment, had perished for naught---and that the government they fondly believed to be, par excellence, a Confederacy of State
sovereignties, had out-heroded Herod in Federal aggrandizement!

    6th.  The principal argument urged by the advocates of this measure is the tyrant's plea, "necessity."  What necessity can exist to yield up the institution for which we have been battling so long and so obstinately, to model our institutions after those of the hypocritical and hated North, to involve our finances in inextricable confusion, or rob our citizens of their well earned property, to eclipse the old Union in our march towards Federal centralization and power, and to become abolitionists like the abolitionists we are fighting?  To deprive the institution of its able-bodied males would be to emasculate it of its pith and value.  The women and children would be rather an encumbrance than an advantage.

    Instead of the proposed measure being a necessity, the reverse of the proposition is a necessity-- an urgent, pressing, palpable necessity.  Our general and State governments have placed our male white population between the ages of sixteen and sixty in the service, with the exception of a few necessary exempts.  If, in addition to this, we place our able bodied slave population in the field, we deprive our country of its entire producing force, and it needs not the eye of a sage to perceive that ruin must follow.  The army and country are not too bountifully supplied with provisions under the present regime.

    7.  The advocates of this measure surely have not considered well the consequences likely to result from arming our slaves. Evidences are not wanting to illustrate the ill-suppressed discontent of many of our slaves in the past.  The people seem to have grown over secure because of the unexpected subordination of our slaves during the war. They should remember that the whole white population being under arms, any uprising of the negroes was more than ever impracticable.  How different might be the state of things, if they too were armed. They would be equal, perhaps superior, in numbers to our effective white force.  What horrors might result from a general revolt?  Yankees without and negroes within!  At best it is not to be expected that they would be more true than our white veterans, and if two-thirds of them should desert and disperse themselves over the country, co-operating with and led by bad men and deserters of long standing, how appalling would be our condition!