y and paradise. Second, the
nation itself could ill sustain the shock incident to such a huge
amputation from the body of its productive labor, and which must have, for
long and bitter years, affected disastrously its solvency, greatness and
progress. Besides, the presence in the lately rebellious States of a mass
of loyal people, like the blacks, constituted an immensely important
element of strength and security to the newly restored Union. And, third,
the blacks themselves had by two centuries of unpaid toil bought the right
to remain in a country which had enslaved them, yet for whose defense and
preservation against foreign and domestic foes and through three wars they
had bared their brave arms and generous breasts and poured out royally and
without measure their devotion, their blood and their life.

The general welfare of the reunited nation demanded not only political
unification of the States under one supreme government, but their social
unification as well on a common industrial basis of free labor. The
coexistence under the old Constitution of two contrary systems of labor
had given rise to seventy years of strife and rivalry between the
sections, and had plunged them finally into one of the fiercest and most
destructive wars of modern times. It was clearly recognized at the close
of that war that the foundations of the restored Union should be made to
rest directly on the enduring bedrock of a uniform system of free labor
for both sections, not as formerly on the shifting sands of two
conflicting social orders. For as long as our ancient duality of labor
system shall continue to exist there will necessarily continue to exist
also duality of ideas, interests and institutions. I do not mean mere
variety in these regards which operates beneficiently, but profound and
abiding social and political differences, engendering profound and abiding
social and political antagonisms, naturally and inevitably affecting
sometimes more, sometimes less, national stability and security, and
leaving everywhere in the subconscious life of the republic a sense of
vague uneasiness, rising periodically to the keenest anxiety, like the
ever-present dread felt by a city subject to seismic disturbances. For
what has once happened, the cause continuing, may happen again.

The Southern soil was at the moment broken up roughly by the hot
ploughshare of civil war. It might have been better prepared for the
reception of the good seed by