ity of animals and the
passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or
from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding
population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material
impoverishment and political inferiority? From one or the other source
its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not the Union
that will be imperilled, but the privileged Order who on every occasion
of a thwarted whim have menaced its disruption, and who will then find
in it their only safety.

We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"--for we accept Mr.
Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever
meant to give it--is to take place in the South itself; because the
Slave System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy
which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the
soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower
level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,--their increase in
numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and
nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no
home-encouragement of varied agriculture,--for the wants of a slave
population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade,
for that is developed only by communities where education induces
refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and
variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in
tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and
bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of
the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding States
may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent
vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create
enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the
true object of all political organizations, and is essential to the
prolonged existence of all those whose life and spirit are derived
directly from the people. Every man who has dispassionately endeavored
to enlighten himself in the matter cannot but see, that, for the many,
the course of things in slaveholding States is substantially what we
have described, a downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and