ossible.

In vain did the aged and the feeble plead once more for compromise. Real
men no longer wished it.

The day of reckoning had come. The seeds of this tragedy were planted in
the foundation structure of the Republic.

The Union of our fathers, for all the high sounding phrases of its
Declaration of Independence was not a democracy. It was from the
beginning an aristocratic republic founded squarely on African Slavery.
And the degraded position assigned to the man who labored with his hands
was recognized in our organic law.

The Constitution itself was the work of a rich and powerful group of
leaders in each State, and its provisions were a compromise of
conflicting sectional property interests.

The world had moved from 1789 to 1861.

The North was unconsciously lifting the banner of a mighty revolution.
The South was clinging with the desperation of despair to the faith of
its fathers.

The North was the world of steam and electricity, of new ideas, of
progress. The South still believed in the divine inspiration of the men
who founded the Republic. They must believe in it, for their racial life
depended on it. Four million negroes could not be loosed among five
million Southern white people and two such races live side by side under
the principles of a pure democracy. Had this issue been put to them in
the beginning not one Southern State would have entered the Union.

The Northern workingman, with steam and electricity bringing North and
South into closer and closer touch, answered this cry of fear from the
South with the ultimatum of democracy:

"This Nation can not endure half slave and half free!"

Back of all the mouthings of demagogues and the billingsgate of
sectionalists lay this elemental fact--a democracy against a republic.

Nor could the sword of the Sections settle such an issue. The sectional
sword could only settle an issue which grew out of it--whether a group
of States holding a common interest in this conflict of principles could
combine for their own peace and safety, leave the old Union, form a new
one and settle it in their own way.

The North said no--the South said yes. This conviction bigger than party
platforms was the brooding terror which brought the sense of tragedy to
young and old, the learned and the unlearned--that made young men see
visions and maids dream of mighty deeds.

* * * * *

The Southern boy's eyes had again rested on the vacant