in all those results of material prosperity which in a free country
show themselves in the general advancement for the good of all, and
give a real meaning to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous
the wealth centred in the hands of a few, it has no longer the
conservative force or the beneficent influence which it exerts when
equably distributed,--even loses more of both where a system of
absenteeism prevails so largely as in the South. In such communities
the seeds of an "irrepressible conflict" are surely if slowly ripening,
and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social
organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in
an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds
itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to
multiply weakness.

The election in November turns on the single and simple question,
Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and
the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against
such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of
it,--is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted
that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess
that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward
since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater
ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr.
Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for
passing him by,--that he represented the most advanced doctrines of his
party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the moralist's
oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment of it as a
theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,--thus summing up
the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and concentrated
the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man, he has that
best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of being always
able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of his opinions
which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect of his speeches
in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to their power. Safe
from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional eloquence as if he had
been inoculated for it early in his career, he addresses himself to the
reason, and what he sa