rances, we are to remember that
the life of the community as of the individual is shaped oftenest by the
inarticulate, unavowed, half-unconscious sentiments:

Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel,--below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

The underlying human force in the slavery question was the primitive
instinct in man to keep all he has got; the instinct of the man who
lives at another's expense to keep on doing so. That underlay all the
fine theories about differences of race, all the theological deductions
from Noah's curse upon Canaan. Another great and constant factor was the
absorption of men and communities, not personally concerned in a social
wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook
beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material
interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the
earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of
the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place.
There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests
closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern
manufacturer; there was the prejudice of color and race; and all these
influences, open or latent, told powerfully for keeping slavery as it
was.

The great default, the fatal failure, was the omission of the Southern
whites, especially their leaders by education and by popular
recognition, to take deliberate and systematic measures for the removal
of slavery. Difficult? Yes, very. Impossible? Why, almost every other
country of North and South America,--including the Spanish-Americans on
whom the English-Americans look down with such superiority,--these all
got rid of slavery without violence or revolution. Whatever the case
required,--of preparation, compensation, new industrial
arrangement,--the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands,
to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few
for instant and unconditional emancipation, there never was a day when
the vast mass of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly
and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery
as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only
they kept it at home. Excuses for non-ac