sts seemed
wholly in the ascendant, and the anti-slavery cause was at a low ebb.
But many things had happened in two decades, below the surface current
of public events, and, just on the threshold of a new era, we may glance
back over these twenty years. All the European world had been full of
movement. France had passed through three revolutions. Germany, Austria,
and Italy had undergone a political upheaval and subsidence; and the
liberal reverses of 1848 were the precursors of national unity and
constitutional freedom in the near future.

England had gone steadily on in the path of conservative progress; had
widened its suffrage by the Reform Act of 1832; had relieved distress
and disarmed discontent by the free trade policy of Sir Robert Peel; her
factory legislation had met a crying need of the new industrial epoch,
and she had pacified and energized Canada by giving her
self-government. Meanwhile American progress had been along lines of its
own. The country had grown at a tremendous rate, and mainly at the North
and West. Immigration had poured in from Europe, and the stream of
native stock from the seaboard States to the West had hardly slackened.
It was the epoch of the railroad and the telegraph. Manufactures had
increased and multiplied; acres fell under cultivation by the million.
In this industrial growth the North had far outstripped the South.
Calhoun had urged the construction of railroads to link the eastern and
western parts of the South, but the political motive could not supply
the want of industrial force. The figures of the census of 1850 were
more eloquent than any orator as to the relative effects of free and
slave labor. Intellectually the period had been prolific. Emerson had
risen, the bright morning star of American literature. Bryant,
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, were telling their stories or
singing their songs. Theology was fruitful of debate and change. The
Unitarian movement had defined itself. Presbyterians and
Congregationalists were discussing the tenets of old school and new. For
"women's rights" a strong and promising advance had been made, in the
face of unpopularity and derision. Religious revivals, foreign missions,
social reforms, were making active way. From all this intellectual and
social movement, unless we except the emotional revivals of religion,
the South stood apart. Literature it had virtually none; its theology
was only conservative and defensive; at most