workmen, and then see who have really pocketed the money, and whether on
the whole the capitalists have been more than properly repaid for their
risks, and wear and tear of _brains_. To be sure we are as yet far from
having realized a regularly arranged harmony of interests. But I see
that here, even in this New England, there is nothing which the great
and most intelligent capitalists desire more than this harmony, or a
system in which every man's brains and labor shall be properly and
abundantly remunerated, since they see (as all must see who reflect)
that the nearer we approach such practical adjustment of forces, the
less liable will they be to fail. And the world, as it has reflected
that labor has flourished among barren rocks, covering them with smiling
villages, under the fostering care of capital, when fertile Southern
lands are a wilderness for want of this harmony between it and capital,
has concluded that the old battle between rich and poor was a folly. The
obscure hamlets of New England, which have within thirty years become
beautiful towns, with lyceums, libraries, and schools, are the most
striking examples on earth of the arrant folly of this gabble of
'capital as opposed to labor.' In the South, however, the old theory is
held as firmly as in the days when John Randolph prophesied Northern
insurrections of starving factory-slaves against manufacturing lords,
and--as President Lincoln recently intimated in his Message--the effort
is there being made to formally enslave labor to capital. That is to
say, the South not only adheres to the obsolete theory that labor is a
foe to capital, but proposes to subdue it to the latter. The progress of
free labor in the North is, however, a constantly increasing proof that
labor _is_ capital.

Let the reader carefully digest this statement, and regard it not as an
abstraction of political economy, but as setting forth a vital truth
intimately allied to our closest interests, and to a future involving
the most serious emergencies. We are at a crisis which demands a new
influx of political thought and new principles. Our Revolution, with its
Constitution, was such an epoch; so too was the old strife between
Federalism and Democracy, in which both sides contended for what were
their rights. Since those days we have gone further, and the present
struggle, precipitated by the madness and folly of the South, sees
those who understand the great and glorious question of free