hole state. In states
where the slave system prevails, the masters, directly or indirectly,
secure all political power, and constitute a ruling aristocracy.
In states where the free-labor system prevails, universal suffrage
necessarily obtains, and the state inevitably becomes, sooner or later,
a republic or democracy.

Russia yet maintains slavery, and is a despotism. Most of the other
European states have abolished slavery, and adopted the system of free
labor. It was the antagonistic political tendencies of the two systems
which the first Napoleon was contemplating when he predicted that Europe
would ultimately be either all Cossack or all republican. Never did
human sagacity utter a more pregnant truth. The two systems are at once
perceived to be incongruous. But they are more than incongruous--they
are incompatible. They never have permanently existed together in
one country, and they never can. It would be easy to demonstrate this
impossibility, from the irreconcilable contrast between their great
principles and characteristics. But the experience of mankind has
conclusively established it. Slavery, as I have already intimated,
existed in every state in Europe. Free labor has supplanted it
everywhere except in Russia and Turkey. State necessities developed in
modern times are now obliging even those two nations to encourage and
employ free labor; and already, despotic as they are, we find them
engaged in abolishing slavery. In the United States, slavery came into
collision with free labor at the close of the last century, and fell
before it in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
but triumphed over it effectually, and excluded it for a period yet
undetermined, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Indeed,
so incompatible are the two systems, that every new State which is
organized within our ever-extending domain makes its first political act
a choice of the one and the exclusion of the other, even at the cost
of civil war, if necessary. The slave States, without law, at the last
national election, successfully forbade, within their own limits, even
the casting of votes for a candidate for President of the United States
supposed to be favorable to the establishment of the free-labor system
in new States.

Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by
side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is
a confederation of States. But in another aspe