or
it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, and habits of the
Southern people, and the Southern people will not be exterminated nor
swamped by migrations either from the North or from Europe. They are
and always will be an agricultural people, and an agricultural people
are and always will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless
unwittingly held for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special
object in which they take a passionate interest. The worst of all
policies is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and depressed
whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of the 29th of
May, 1865. Of course that policy will not be carried out, and if the
negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote with the wealthy
landholding class, and aid them in resisting all socialistic
tendencies. The humanitarians will fail for the want of a good social
grievance against which they can declaim.

In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as a
speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance. It is
aided much by the congregational constitution of their religion; yet it
is weak at home, and is resisted practically by the territorial
division of power. New England means Massachusetts, and nowhere is the
subdivision of the powers of government carried further, or the
constitution of the territorial democracy more complete, than in that
State. Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the farther
they are from home and the less its right to interfere with them, the
more in earnest and the more effective for evil does it become. Its
nature is to mind every one's business but its own. But now that
slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in the United States a social
grievance of magnitude enough to enlist any considerable number of the
people, even of Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it. Negro
enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a question
that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not serve their
purpose of prolonged agitation. They could not and never did carry
away the nation, even on the question of slavery itself, and
abolitionism had comparatively little direct influence in abolishing
slavery; and the exclusion of negro