they. But it is
not loyalty to the American Government, nor indeed to any political
institutions whatsoever. It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No
other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The
Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest
danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The
difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not
equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe--if we
except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single
institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken
absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to
its own will. Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it;
nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was
ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so
watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined.

The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic
rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole
mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. Hence for twenty or
thirty years--not by virtue of law, but against law--the mails have been
searched throughout the South for incendiary matter, with a strictness
of censorship unknown to any Government of Europe. Northern men and
Europeans immigrating to the South have uniformly been quietly dragooned
and terrorized into the acceptance of theories and usages wholly unknown
to any free country;--quietly, only because the occasion for doing the
same thing violently and barbarously had not yet arrived.

The two civilizations, North and South, are wholly unlike. Without the
slavery of four millions of men, to be kept in subjection by a
conspiracy to that effect, on the part of the whole free population--the
lack of fidelity to which conspiracy is the only treason known in those
regions--the existence of a people like the inhabitants of the Southern
States would be a riddle incapable of solution. Slavery itself, is _a
remnant of barbarism overlapping the period of civilization_; but,
unlike the slaveries of the barbaric ages, American slavery has been
stimulated into all the enterprising and audacious energy of this
advanced and progressive age. It is an engine of ancient barbarism
worked by the steam of modern intelligence. The character of the people
which has been created under this rar