s based on smothered pauperism,
tolerated ignorance, and organized degradation have to fear is the
subterranean fire, which finds its vent in blazing craters, or breaks up
all the ancient landmarks in earth-shattering convulsions. God forbid
that we should invoke any such catastrophe even for those who have been
hardest upon us in our bitter trial! Yet so surely as American society
founds itself upon the rights of civilized man, there is no permanent
safety for any nation but in the progressive recognition of the American
principle. The right of governing a nation belongs to the people of the
nation; and the urgent duty of those provisional governments which we
call monarchies, empires, aristocracies is to educate their people with
a view to the final surrender of all power into their hands. A little
longer patience, a little more sacrifice, a little more vigorous,
united action, on the part of the Loyal States, and the Union will
behold herself mirrored in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the stateliest
of earthly empires,--not in her own aspiring language, but by the
confession of her most envious rival, _predominating over all mankind_.
No Tartar hordes pouring from the depths of Asia, no Northern barbarians
swarming out of the hive of nations, no Saracens sweeping from their
deserts to plant the Crescent over the symbol of Christendom, were more
terrible to the principalities and powers that stood in their way, than
the Great Republic, by the bare fact of its existence, will become to
every government which does not hold its authority from the people.
However our present conflict may seem at first sight to do violence, in
certain respects, to the principles of self-government, everybody knows
that it is a strife of democratic against oligarchic institutions, of a
progressive against a stationary civilization, of the rights of manhood
against the claims of a class, of a national order representing the will
of a people against a conspiracy organized by a sectional minority.

Just so far as _the people_ of Europe understand the nature of our armed
controversy, they will understand that we are pleading their cause. Nay,
if the mass of our Southern brethren did but know it, we are pleading
theirs just as much. The emancipation of industry has never taken effect
in the South, and never could until labor ceased to be degrading.

We should be unreasonable to demand the sympathy of those classes which
have everything to lose fr