derived much of their strength from the power which slavery gave to the slaveowner; the slaveholding oligarchy, a small aggregate as compared with that of the whole nation, found in slavery the corner stone of its entire political edifice-the patronage of States and of the United States as well as all the wealth and profit which it identified with the institution. Northern defenders of slavery, if they fell short of Southern, differed in degree rather than in kind, whatsoever the basis of their defense: the whole fabric of argument for the institution embodying a state of mind the very existence of which seems to later generations almost impossible to believe in. When an intelligent and highly cultivated people believe that slavery is of divine origin, is an economic necessity, is based on scientific foundations, and is a blessing to the enslaved, no other force than war can dislodge the institution among them, so long as climate makes the continuance of the institution possible. Who does not hear at the present time the saying oft-repeated that the negroes were better off under slavery than as they are to-day? That then they had no cares; were happy and contented, having kind masters and mistresses to look out for them, to supply them with food and clothing and with medicine in time of sickness? What indolent, dirty, ragged negro at the North to-day is not a text for a remark on his better condition as a slave? What negro offender, North or South, does not call forth opinions that under slavery he would have been safeguarded and society also? If these opinions, often responding to convictions, linger North and South half a century after the abolition of slavery, with what effectiveness could the argument for slavery be put forth when it embodied cotton and rice and tobacco interests; political patronage, official position, social rank, and the very existence of a national régime? To understand the seeming anomaly we must return to a state of mind in which the American people lived; a state that can be paralleled perhaps by the conditions of some distant geological age during which plants and animals existed of form and kind wholly unlike those of the present, an age in

which it was impossible for the plants and animals of our own age to exist. It might seem true, then, that the human mind develops, passes through stages or epochs which, calmly investigated at a later time, seem as strange as would the Triassic or Jurassic age could we for a moment behold them.

The defense of slavery at the South implied the suppression of every force and influence, every effort or agency which tended to depreciate the institution. Education was pro-slavery; religious instruction was pro-slavery; the press was pro-slavery; conversation was pro-slavery. More than this, thought and expression must be actively pro-slavery, there must be a propaganda of slavery: the institution must be aggressive in order to live. So all text-books must be beyond suspicion of inculcating anti-slavery doctrines; preachers must be orthodox on slavery, even books and papers received from outside the South must be free from anti-slavery taint. Moral philosophies written by Northern men, and Wayland's book, familiar yet to thousands as a text-book in their college days, must be "edited" by the utterances of the Southern instructor who used it; even classic English writers, Burke, Chatham and Fox, expressed sentiments on the slavery question which Southern youth were taught could not be tolerated. To-day, at the South, school books on American history are used which teach that the Civil War as waged by the South was a "war for Southern independence" and Northern text-books on the subject which assert that the essential cause of the war was slavery are refused admission into the schools. Northern publishers of school books have one set for the South and another for the North. This continuing difference of opinion is a vestige of slavery times.

Innumerable speeches were delivered in Southern legislatures, at the hustings, at public gatherings for literary improvement, at agricultural meetings, in conventions of various sorts and in Congress to prove that the South, under slavery, was richer and more prosperous than the North. The argument for material prosperity can hardly be said to be the highest in character that can be advanced either for or

against slavery, but the love of money affords an easy entrance for such an argument into the mind, and thousands who might hesitate and condemn slavery on moral grounds were convinced that the material argument entirely swept away their moral objections. Senator Hammond in 1857 quite satisfied thousands at the North, as he satisfied the South, when he made his boastful statements of the indebtedness of the whole nation to the cotton planter for making it possible to avoid utter national bankruptcy, at least at the North. As intercourse between South and North fell away and the South became isolated and the North looked toward the West and dreamed of new free States, it became easier for each section to talk in provincial fashion and boast of its riches and its strength, its culture, its knowledge, its morality. History abounds in examples of gasconade. The perusal of American history as it has been written until recent years gives the reader the impression that America was only a seething political cauldron. Now in truth politics, save as it gives expression and understanding to economics does not interest the American. It is safe to say that the voter votes with his party because he believes or thinks that he believes that the triumph of his party will in some way promote his general welfare, even advance his own business or occupation toward a greater prosperity. The political histories of the United States-and as yet they comprise most that have been written-convey the impression that from a very early day in our national history the American people were consciously engaged in a fierce struggle over slavery. It is true that the contest between freedom and slavery was going on as it has been going on for thousands of years, in one form or another, but it is also true that even down to the outbreak of the Civil War there was no actual conflict between North and South over slavery as a conscious, voluntary, persistent strife among the mass of people either North or South. Even Abraham Lincoln was not in 1860, the year of his election to the presidency, an abolitionist, nor was the party which elected him an abolition

party: the Republican party enrolled abolitionists, but abolitionists did not control the Republican party in 1860. People at the North, that is the plain people, however they criticised slavery accepted it as a fact, a condition, an institution, and hoped that some day it might pass away. Public opinion rests ultimately on economic ground and whatsoever determines the character of that ground determines the character of public opinion. But economic conditions quite elude us until time has set events in perspective: then we may be able to see in what direction men and things were moving.

The year 1840 may be taken as the year when slavery was as secure, as productive economically, as deeply intrenched in American life, as at any time in its history in this country. And the decade from 1840 to 1850 may be taken as the period when the state of mind in America which made slavery possible was as calm and fixed and apparently dominant as at any decade in the history of slavery in America. A comparison between North and South in wealth and industry and in education during the years when slavery was yet removed many years from extinction may disclose forces at work in the nation likely at last to determine the national character.

It has already been said that the North encouraged, the South discouraged, invention and the use of machinery. Had a map of the United States been made in 1846 to show the distribution of inventions during the year, the region of slavery showed the fewest, the region of freedom the most: the fourteen slave States, with a population of seven and a third millions received seventy-six patents, that year, or one for each 96,505 persons; to the free States, with a population of nine and (a little less than) three-quarter millions there were granted five hundred and sixty-four patents, or one for each 17,249 persons and had the map been shaded so as to indicate the intensity of American inventiveness, the region least shaded would have indicated the cotton-growing States and the shade would have deepened, through the slave States, northward, almost imperceptibly

and slowly, Maryland, showing twenty-one inventions; but Massachusetts showing sixty-two, and New York State, with one-fourth the population of the slave States, showing two hundred and seven patents, or more than three times as many as the whole South. The incentive to invention was lacking and the power was discouraged by the industrial system and the dominant thought of the South. The effect was startlingly clear when North and South came into armed conflict: the armies of the North enrolled hundreds of thousands of skilled mechanics whose efficiency displayed itself at critical moments-when bridges must be constructed amidst novel obstacles, rolling-stock repaired far from shops and mechanical conveniences, and again when unexpected difficulties confronted them. The Southern soldiers, brave, enduring, devoted to their cause, were no match for the inventive minds opposed to them and in consequence were handicapped in all that pertained to mechanical work necessary in their military operations. If slavery were compatible with high economic efficiency, as displayed, for example, in inventiveness and the use of machinery, it may well be doubted whether the institution would not now characterize the dominant civilization of the earth. But the slave can never be more than a rude man with tools; untrustworthy for the care and operation of machinery and quite destitute of the practically inventive faculty. In excluding machinery and by discouraging inventiveness, the South deprived herself of one of the chief powers in modern civilization, as the Civil War disclosed. Is it strange that in 1846 there were some thoughtful people in America who believed that the machinery in daily use in the free States had a greater productive ability than the 3,000,000 slaves at the South?

The export of cotton was the chief source of income to the South, yet the export trade was not in Southern hands. In 1846, the free States on the Atlantic seaboard had 2,160,501 tons of shipping, the slaves States on the seaboard, only 401,583 tons; the State of Ohio, two thousand miles from the ocean, had 39,917 tons, while Virginia, abounding in