it in self-defense to justify and extend its
system. This may be effective as a criticism of the extreme
Abolitionists, but as regards the South it is rather a confession than a
defense. On a subject involving its whole prosperity, its essential
character, its relation to the world's civilization, did it reverse its
course at the bitter words of a few critics? If that were true, it would
bespeak passionate irritability, an incapacity for the healthy
give-and-take of practical life, in keeping with the worst that could be
said of the effect of slavery on the master. In truth the violence of
Garrison and his few followers was but a minor element in the case.
Slavery had become immensely profitable; it was the corner-stone of a
social fabric in which the upper class had an extremely comfortable
place; it was involved with the whole social and political life of the
section. It was too important to be dealt with half-heartedly: it must
be accepted, justified, believed in,--or it must be abandoned. John
Randolph of Roanoke had said of slavery: "We are holding a wolf by the
ears; it is perilous alike to hold on or to let go." But one or the
other must be done, and the South elected to keep on holding the wolf.

The better to understand the developments of the following years, it
will be well to consider a group of representative men,--Calhoun,
Garrison, Birney, Channing, and Webster.

Calhoun had many of the elements of high statesmanship--clear views,
strong convictions, forcible speech. He was ambitious, but in no ignoble
fashion; he often served his country well, as in his efficient
administration of the war department under Munroe, his protest against
the spoils system and the personal government of Jackson, and his
influence in averting war with England over the Oregon boundary in
1845-46. After the Presidency was clearly out of his reach--from
1832--he was growingly identified with and devoted to the interests of
his own section, yet always with a patriotic regard for the Union as a
whole. He had that fondness for theories and abstractions which was
characteristic of the Southern statesmen, fostered perhaps by the
isolated life of the plantation. With this went a kind of provincialism
of thought, bred from the wide difference which slavery made from the
life of the world at large. When Calhoun, in one of his Senate orations
was magnifying the advantage of slave over free labor, Wade of Ohio, who
sat listening intently,