shed, cultured,
exceedingly capable, and wholly unprincipled class, rests the whole
burden of this war. Forced up by the bottom heat of slavery, the
ruling class in all the disloyal States arrogated to themselves a
superiority not compatible with republican equality, nor with just
morals. They claimed a right of pre-eminence. An evil prophet
arose who trained these wild and luxuriant shoots of ambition to the
shapely form of a political philosophy. By its reagents they
precipitated drudgery to the bottom of society, and left at the top
what they thought to be a clarified fluid. In their political
economy, labor was to be owned by capital; in their theory of
government, the few were to rule the many. They boldly avowed, not
the fact alone, that, under all forms of government, the few rule
the many, but their right and duty to do so. Set free from the
necessity of labor, they conceived a contempt for those who felt its
wholesome regimen. Believing themselves foreordained to supremacy,
they regarded the popular vote, when it failed to register their
wishes, as an intrusion and a nuisance. They were born in a garden,
and popular liberty, like freshets overswelling their banks, but
covered their dainty walks and flowers with slime and mud--of
democratic votes. When, with shrewd observation, they saw the
growth of the popular element in the Northern States, they
instinctively took in the inevitable events. It must be controlled
or cut off from a nation governed by gentlemen! Controlled, less
and less, could it be in every decade; and they prepared secretly,
earnestly, and with wide conference and mutual connivance, to
separate the South from the North. We are to distinguish between
the pretenses and means, and the real causes of this war. To
inflame and unite the great middle class of the South, who had no
interest in separation and no business with war, they alleged
grievances that never existed, and employed arguments which they,
better than all other men, knew to be specious and false.

Slavery itself was cared for only as an instrument of power or of
excitement. They had unalterably fixed their eye upon empire, and
all was good which would secure that, and bad which hindered it.
Thus, the ruling class of the South--an aristocracy as intense,
proud, and inflexible as ever existed--not limited either by
customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular
order of society, playing a reciproca