be called a fanatic. Yet the abolitionists did
worse than this, for they incited the negroes to insurrection. Nor do
I think that the question is affected by the fact that many of the
abolitionists were upright, earnest, and devout. A good man is not
necessarily a wise man, and I remember that Samuel Johnson and John
Wesley supported King George against the American colonists.)

Unfortunately, something more than mere political rancour was at
work. The areas of slave and of free labour were divided by an
artificial frontier. "Mason and Dixon's line," originally fixed as
the boundary between Pennsylvania on the north and Virginia and
Maryland on the south, cut the territory of the United States into
two distinct sections; and, little by little, these two sections,
geographically as well as politically severed, had resolved
themselves into what might almost be termed two distinct nations.

Many circumstances tended to increase the cleavage. The South was
purely agricultural; the most prosperous part of the North was purely
industrial. In the South, the great planters formed a landed
aristocracy; the claims of birth were ungrudgingly admitted; class
barriers were, to a certain extent, a recognised part of the social
system, and the sons of the old houses were accepted as the natural
leaders of the people. In the North, on the contrary, the only
aristocracy was that of wealth; and even wealth, apart from merit,
had no hold on the respect of the community. The distinctions of
caste were slight in the extreme. The descendants of the Puritans, of
those English country gentlemen who had preferred to ride with
Cromwell rather than with Rupert, to pray with Baxter rather than
with Laud, made no parade of their ancestry; and among the extreme
Republicans existed an innate but decided aversion to the recognition
of social grades. Moreover, divergent interests demanded different
fiscal treatment. The cotton and tobacco of the South, monopolising
the markets of the world, asked for free trade. The manufacturers of
New England, struggling against foreign competition, were strong
protectionists, and they were powerful enough to enforce their will
in the shape of an oppressive tariff. Thus the planters of Virginia
paid high prices in order that mills might flourish in Connecticut;
and the sovereign States of the South, to their own detriment, were
compelled to contribute to the abundance of the wealthier North. The
interests of labou