that children shall be worked only ten hours a day-and the sabre and the bayonet are the instruments of orderbe it so. It is their affair, not ours. We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor -by which our population doubles every twenty years-by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land -by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and many fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our productions. All we demand of other peoples is to be left alone, to work out our own high destinies. United together, and we must be the most independent, as we are among the most important, of the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace, than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free, prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States."

It seems impossible to conceive to-day, that such a declaration could ever have emanated from any body of people in the United States. Its morality, its politics, its constitutional law, its economics were refuted by facts and conditions at the time of its utterance and anterior: the records attest that. The Declaration of Causes was intended as the appeal of the South to the considerate judgment of mankind: an appeal to the outside world—to the company of nations. The address to the people of the slaveholding States was a domestic appeal, culminating in the invitation to form a slaveholding Confederacy. To this had the Slave Power come in 1860. And the entire basis and foundation of both Declaration and Address was slavery. Every assertion of Northern faithlessness to the obligations. of the Constitution, every claim of economic supremacy of slavery as an institution rests upon the same kind of

foundation. And behind all claims there shows forth the travesty of so-called free institutions. It is a significant fact that the Declaration of Independence of 1776 has passed into literature and the speech of civilized men the world overbut not a line, nor a phrase, nor a thought of these two fulminations from the South, in 1860, lingers in the memory of man. And why? Because they mean nothing; they rest on no principle of truth or justice-but upon a total misconception of free institutions and of the course of civilization. That they appealed to Southern men; that Southern men believed that their asseverations were true, no man doubts. The South went to war in defense of these assertions—and no braver people ever fought, though for a worthless cause. The astonishing thing is the evidence, which such documents as these give, of how a state of mind may possess a people and impel them to destruction. Narrowed down to the ultimate issue, the South was a unit for slavery and was determined to confederate with herself exclusively for slavery. It has been the fashion in many quarters to deny that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and nowhere is the denial sharper than among Southerners. It is evidently difficult for them, of a later generation, to conceive that any rational people would go to war to save-more-to extend and perpetuate slavery.

And yet the address of South Carolina to the people of the slaveholding States corroborates the record; climate, soil, productions, bred conflicting interests between North and South, and the address also emphasizes the amazing confidence of the South in her exclusive importance to the world. Slavery and cotton are the chief objects of God's providence, and the only true conception of free government is the slavocratic conception.

The North had violated the Constitution from the beginning, yet the address tells the Southern people that the grandeur, expansion and power of the United States were due to Southern statesmanship: that that statesmanship had guided the country. In other words, the North had wrecked

the Constitution in spite of the fact that the South had controlled public affairs from the beginning of the Union.

The address labors to establish a parallel between secession, in 1860, and revolution, in 1776; that the Southern States, in 1860, were in precisely the situation of the Colonies in 1776. But the parallel is in words only. Congress under the Constitution never bore, and never could bear the relation to the several States of the Union that Parliament bore to the thirteen Colonies; had the people of these Colonies participated in the establishment of Parliament, the comparison might limp along: but to get the figure squarely on all fours is impossible. Such a parallel could have made no appeal to the people of the North; they had ceased to be provincial and their conceptions of free government forbade any toleration of such a far-fetched and mistaken figure. The entire history of slavery at the South was a history of industrial limitation, educational limitation, mechanical limitation, moral limitation. There was no law or custom to prevent South Carolina's building the navies of the world, if she chose-save the laws and customs which slavery dictated. There were no laws or customs which relegated Southern cities as suburbs of Northern cities but the laws and customs and imperious economic consequences of slavery.

But the Carolina address declared a truth when it associated the North with the South in protecting, compromising, and profiting by slavery. To that accusation the North must plead guilty. But the state of mind which induced that association, that compromise, that protection, that profitsharing, was breaking up: the North was awakening to the wrong of slavery, and the consciousness and conviction of that wrong had uttered itself in that utterance which alarmed and angered the South and which South Carolina. cited both in its Declaration of Causes, and in its Address. appealing to the slaveholding States to unite with it in forming a Slaveholding Confederacy. That alarming utterance was Lincoln's:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolvedI do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as newNorth as well as South."

The country was now well into the third year since these words were uttered and the man who uttered them was now the president-elect of the United States. The South was announcing her decision in the appeal of South Carolina "To be one of a great slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses-with a population four times greater than that of the United States when they achieved their independence of the British Empire-with productions which make our existence more important to the world than that of any other people inhabiting it-with common institutions to defend, and common dangers to encounter-we ask your sympathy and confederation. All fraternity of feeling between the North and the South is lost, or has been converted into hate; and we, of the South, are at last driven together by the stern necessity which controls the existence of nations. We rejoice that other nations should be satisfied with their institutions. . . . We are satisfied with ours. If they prefer a system of industry, in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict-and chronic starvation keeps down the natural increase of population—and a man is worked out in eight years—and the law ordains that children shall be worked only ten hours a day-and the sabre and the bayonet are the instruments of order-be it so. It is their affair, not ours. We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified

in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor-by which our population doubles every twenty years-by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land-by which order is preserved by an unpaid police, and many fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our productions. All we demand of other peoples is to be left alone, to work out our own high destinies. . United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace, than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free, prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States."

To this conclusion had the slave power come; to this end had it planned; for this consummation had it hoped. Was it possible, now, at the moment when Lincoln should assume the duties of president of the United States that his earnest expectation could be realized, that the Union would not be dissolved that the house would not fall-and that it would cease to be divided?