e laws and
institutions. New England is the prolific hive whence swarm all the
_isms_ that infest the country, say they. They do not understand that in
a state of society where education is universal, where mind is
constantly meeting mind, and thought clashing with thought, the restless
and heaving mass must be always throwing up something to the surface, it
may be froth, it may be tangled weeds, rough stones, or plain shells, or
it may be curious and valuable gems fit to glitter in a coronet, or
shells of dazzling colors and manifold convolutions fit to shine in rare
cabinets. The waveless and stagnant calm of the mass of the Southern
mind can have no conception of the intellectual movement that is ever
going on in such a community as New England.

But this radicalism especially bears on its 'horrid front' that bugbear
of all conservatism, the world over--_abolition_. There is no word so
abused as that. The thing itself is as old and inevitable as the
relation of cause and effect, as the existence of sin and righteousness,
as the contest between God and Satan. Just as if there could help being
an abolition sentiment where there existed the aggressive, hateful
principle of slavery!

Then that peculiar and valuable trait of Yankee character, which the
French so aptly call _savoir faire_, and which they themselves term
_faculty_, the power of accomplishing, the knowing how to do, the
understanding how to suit means to ends, which makes a Yankee so useful
and versatile, and consequently a valuable acquisition to society--has
received its full share of Southern abuse and ridicule. 'They palm off
upon us their inventions, half of which are worthless,' say they. 'They
cheat us with their wares, their manufactures, their patents, and
nostrums. They grow rich on our necessities, and take the world's trade
from our harbors, so superior to theirs, and they are always busy, and
intermeddling in everybody's affairs; and we hate them--ah, how we _do_
hate them!' In short, a certain leading class at the South, that which
moulds and leads the hollow, shrinking, scared thing they called _public
opinion_, have come to hate and detest everything distinctively New
English, and finally to make the wicked, traitorous attempt to overturn
the Government, which they know received its highest and controlling
impulse from the Puritan ideas of that portion of the country. In the
material world, nothing is plainer than the fact embodied in the ol