d by the
sentence, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread." We are
to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which Nature
and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of
man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues
it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least
includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man's
political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy
under the imputation.

But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under
the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which
we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional
one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern
white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration
of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern
States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry;
that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger
of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted
closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our
polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh
seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change,--as if the fair hair
and skin of those ancestral _non Angli sed angeli_ should crisp into
wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can
hold any office under the national government, however petty, without an
open recantation of those principles which he drew in with his mother's
milk,--those principles which, in the better days of the republic,
even a slaveholder could write down in the great charter of our
liberties,--those principles which now only the bells and cannon
are allowed to utter on the Fourth of July or the Seventeenth of
June,--bells that may next call out the citizen-soldiery to aid in the
rendition of a slave,--cannon whose brazen lips may next rebuke the
freedom whose praises they but yesterday so emptily thundered.

When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared
this continent for the experiment of Democracy,--when we think of those
forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august
breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best
blood in the day of her trial,--when we remember the f