very occasion of a thwarted whim have menaced its
disruption, and who will then find in it their only safety.

We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"--for we accept Mr.
Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever
meant to give it--is to take place in the South itself; because the
Slave-System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy
which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the
soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower
level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,--their increase in
numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and
nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no
home-encouragement of varied agriculture,--for the wants of a slave
population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland
trade, for that is developed only by communities where education
induces refinement, where facility of communication stimulates
invention and variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's
improvement in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement
to all, and bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap
university of the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that
slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they
fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant
consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing
communities of men, which is the true object of all political
organizations, and which is essential to the prolonged existence of
all those whose life and spirit are derived directly from the people.
Every man who has dispassionately endeavored to enlighten himself in
the matter cannot but see, that, for the many, the course of things in
slaveholding states is substantially what we have described, a
downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and in all those
results of material prosperity which in a free country show themselves
in the general advancement for the good of all and give a real meaning
to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous the wealth centred in
the hands of a few, it has no longer the conservative force or the
beneficent influence which it exerts when equably distributed,--even
loses more of both where a system of absenteeism prevails so