Alexandria Gazette

The Impending Danger.

It is no longer the part of prudence to deny or to conceal the fact, that the Union is in danger. The present state of things in Congress threatens the worst results. The last week, which opened under such flattering auspices, closed amid omens the most saddening. While the people clamor at the door of the Capitol, demanding and even imploring that tranquility should be restored by a speedy adjustment of the slave question, their servants openly defy them, and deliberately plot the public ruin in the halls of legislation. When the House adjourned on Saturday last, it was in a state of feeling in the highest degree embittered and threatening. Men asked each other what could now be done to save the country, and the veterans of many a Congressional crisis, shook their heads at the prospect, and confessed their inability to suggest any other method by which the inharmonious elements in Congress would be united. A violent and discursive debate was opened on Thursday, and the three-thrashed straw of argument, universally familiar, is again to be subjected to the tedious process of legislative wrangling. In the meanwhile, the party, whose motto is concession and union, are absolutely in a minority in the House, while those who take extreme measures, and who refuse to be guided by the light of an aroused public opinion, are practically in the majority. We said months ago, that the Union was in danger: but now the peril is immediate and terrible. Every day adds material to the excitement and to the phrenzy. The stealing of fugitive slaves, on the one hand, and the holding of Northern and South disunion conventions on the other, occurring almost daily, are rapidly burning up the match that leads to the magazine—laid, as it has been, by a long series of criminations and recriminations, and now openly kept alive by the insane fanatics of the day. That phrase, which should "strike the hard earth breathless," "the dissolution of the American Union," is now proclaimed in both sections of our country, until those who execrated and fled from its pestilential touch, have come to contemplate its horrid features, and even to hold it up as a chosen alternative. The people must awake and act before it is too late"—before the Union is so far overcome by the common enemy, that its true friends cannot save it. All is not well at Washington, and it is right that those should know it upon whom the whole government depends when assailed by the domestic or the foreign adversary.—Pennsylvanian.