most wastefully, and the majority of its white inhabitants kept in
incredible ignorance, meanness, and poverty, simply that a few
privileged families might remain 'first and foremost.' These opinions
were most clearly sustained, and the country was amazed. People began to
ask if it was quite right, after all, to suffer this slavery to grow and
grow, when it was manifestly reacting on the poor white man, and
literally sinking him _below the level of the black_. This was the
second movement on the slave question, and its effect was startling.

But there was yet a third advance required, and it came with the past
year and the war, in the form of the now so rapidly expanding
'Emancipation' movement. HELPER had shown that slavery had
degraded the poor whites, but the events leading to the present struggle
indicated to all intelligent humanity that it was rapidly demoralizing
and ruining in the most hideous manner the minds of the _masters_ of the
slaves--nay, that its foul influence was spreading like a poison mist
over the entire continent. The universal shout of joyful approbation
which the whole South had raised years ago when a Northern senator was
struck down and beaten in the most infamously cowardly manner, had
caused the very horror of amazement at such fearful meanness, among all
true hearted and manly _men_, the world over. But when there came from
the 'first families' grinnings of delight over the vilest thievery and
forgery and perjury by FLOYD and his fellows,--when the whole
South, after agreeing in carrying on an election, refused to abide by
its results,--when the whole Southern press abounded in the vilest
denunciations of labor and poverty, and in Satanic contempt of
everything 'Yankee,' meaning thereby all that had made the North and
West prosperous and glorious,--and when, finally, it was found that this
loathsome poison was working through the North itself, corrupting the
young with pseudo-aristocratic pro-slavery sympathies,--then indeed it
became apparent that _for the sake of all, and for that of men in
comparison to whose welfare that of the negro was a mere trifle_, this
fearful disease must be in some form abated. The result was the
development of Emancipation on the broadest possible grounds,--of
Emancipation for the sake of the Union and of the white man,--to be
brought about, however, by the will of the people, subject to such
rules as discussion and expediency might determine. This was the pre