society in the Union. This war had the same origin and necessity of
every great conflict between the people and the aristocracy since the
world began.

Every war of this kind in history has been the result of the advancement
of the people in liberty. Now the people have inaugurated the conflict
against the aristocracy, either in the interest of self-government, or
an imperial rule which should virtually rest upon their suffrage. Now
the aristocracy has risen upon the people, who were becoming too strong
and free, to conquer and govern them through republican or monarchical
forms of society. There has always been an irrepressible conflict
between aristocracy and democracy; in times of peace carried on by all
the agencies of popular advancement; but in every nation finally
bursting into civil war. And every such war, however slow its progress,
or uncertain its immediate consequence, has finally left the mass of
the people nearer liberty than it found them.

The northern Grecian states represented the cause of the people; and the
oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so
rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic
expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause
met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later,
under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the
Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its original elements.

Julius Caesar destroyed the power of the old Roman aristocracy in the
interest of the people of the Roman empire. Under the name of 'The
Republic,' that patrician class had oppressed the people of Rome and her
provinces for years as never was people oppressed before. After fifty
years of civil war, Julius and Augustus Caesar organized the masses of
this world-wide empire, and established a government under which the
aristocracy was fearfully worried, but which administered such, justice
to the world as had never before been possible.

The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
involved the whole of Europe for eighty years, were begun by the civil
and religious aristocracy of Europe to crush the progress of religious
and civil liberty among the people. These wars continued until religious
freedom was established in Germany, Holland, and Great Britain, and
those seeds of political liberty sown that afterward sprang up in the
American republic.

The English civil war