Actually the rest of the quote is more important and is most often omitted: "Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting 'A' to satisfy 'B'. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods."

The War Between the States could not have been about the preservation of the Union. The Union would have continued, but it just would have been smaller. It was certainly not about slavery - though its abolition was the wonderful effect of it. It was about the right of a state to secede. That from then on states could not secede was the disastrous effect for the reasons Hencken spelled out. The slave states (not all were Southern states) were wrong to allow slavery. It's arguable that slavery was going to end in the South in the not too distant future. The Northern states were wrong to force the Southern states into a union it wanted out of. Unfortunately, the US Constitution did not outlaw slavery (if it had, there would have been no US). Mencken was a racist, probably no more than most people of the time, but regardless of that, he was right again.