mmense industrial prosperity, was,
in sooth, the origin and mainspring of its powerful and progressive
civilization. And so, while the preservation of the peculiar institution
and civilization of the former necessitated a rupture of the old Union and
the formation of a new one, founded on Negro slavery, every interest and
attachment of the latter cried out for the maintenance of the old and the
destruction of the new government. The long conflict of the two rival
systems of labor culminated in the war to save the old Union on the part
of the North and to establish a new one on the part of the South, whose
Constitution rested directly upon the doctrine of social unity. Social
duality was the great fact in the Constitution of the old Union; social
uniformity was to be the great fact in the new. A State divided socially
against itself cannot stand. The South learned this supreme lesson in
political philosophy well, much more quickly and thoroughly than had the
North, whose comprehension of it was painfully slow. And even that part of
the grand truth which it did come to apprehend after prolonged wrestlings
with bitter experience it reduced to practice in every emergency with
moral fears and tremblings.

In the tremendous trial of strength between the sections which followed
the rebel shot on Sumter the South was at the end of four years completely
overmatched by the North, and by sheer weight of numbers and material
resources was borne down at all points and forced back into the old Union,
less its system of slave labor. For the destruction of the Southern
Confederacy had involved, as a military necessity, the destruction of
Negro slavery, which was its chief cornerstone. With the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution the ancient cause of sectional
difference and strife, viz., duality of labor systems, was supposed, quite
generally at the North, to have been removed, and that a new era of unity
in this respect had thereupon straightway begun. It seems to have been
little understood by the North at the time, and since, for that matter,
that Negro slavery in the South would die hard, and that it has a fatal
gift of metamorphosis (ability to change its form without changing its
nature), and that while it had under the well-directed stroke of the
national arm disappeared as chattel slavery, it would reappear, unless
hindered, as African serfdom throughout the Southern States, and that they
would return to the