t affects
every one's person. The great civil war between Charles I. and the
English Parliament was in part caused by soap, which the monopolists
made of so bad a quality that it destroyed the clothes which it should
have cleaned. Of "the monopolers and polers of the people," as he called
them, Sir John Culpeper said, "We find them in the dye-fat, the
wash-bowl, and the powdering-tub." As a monarchy was made to fall
through the monopoly of soap and other ordinary articles, so was it
purposed that a republic should be crushed through the monopoly of the
material from which the sheets and shirts of laborers are manufactured.
There was not much chivalry in the basis of Southern power, but most
grand revolutions are brought about by acting on the lives of the
masses, who are more easily moved by appeals to their sense of immediate
interest than by reference to the probable consequences of a certain
kind of political action. Our party-men know this, and hence it is,
that, while they have not much to say about the excellence of slavery,
they ask the Irish to oppose the overthrow of that institution, on the
ground, that, if it were to cease to exist, all the negroes of the South
would come to the North, and work for a dime a day,--which nonsense
there are some persons so ignorant as to believe.

To return to 1762: the people of the Colonies were as martially disposed
as are the people of the States in these days. "In the heat of the Old
French War," says Mr. Hawthorne, speaking of the inhabitants of New
England, "they might be termed a martial people. Every man was a
soldier, or the father or brother of a soldier; and the whole land
literally echoed with the roll of the drum, either beating up for
recruits among the towns and villages, or striking the march toward the
frontier. Besides the provincial troops, there were twenty-three British
regiments in the northern colonies. The country has never known a period
of such excitement and warlike life, except during the
Revolution,--perhaps scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and
this a stirring and eventful one." There has not been so much movement
in the Secession War as characterized that in which our ancestors were
engaged a century ago, and which was fought in America and in India, in
Germany and in Portugal, in Italy and in Africa, in France and in
Bohemia. As the great Lisbon earthquake had been felt on the shores of
Ontario, so had the war which began the year of t