. The
whole great scheme with which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and
which has finally killed him, represented the other. Beside this nature,
true and fresh and new, there was another nature, false and effete and
old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to
discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other
nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a
new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the
structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and
which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of
the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature
depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other
scorned him. The one was simple and direct; the other, complex, full of
sophistries and self-excuses. The one was free to look all that claimed
to be truth in the face, and separate the error from the truth that
might be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, because its own
established prides and systems were dearer to it than the truth itself,
and so even truth went about in it doing the work of error. The one was
ready to state broad principles, of the brotherhood of man, the
universal fatherhood and justice of God, however imperfectly it might
realize them in practice; the other denied even the principles, and so
dug deep and laid below its special sins the broad foundation of a
consistent, acknowledged sinfulness. In a word, one nature was full of
the influences of Freedom, the other nature was full of the influences
of Slavery.

In general, these two regions of our national life were separated by a
geographical boundary. One was the spirit of the North, the other was
the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature was by no means all a
Southern thing. There it had an organized, established form, a certain
definite, established institution about which it clustered. Here,
lacking advantage, it lived in less expressive ways and so lived more
weakly. There, there was the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward
and visible sign round which the inward and spiritual temper gathered
and kept itself alive. But who doubts that among us the spirit of
slavery lived and thrived? Its formal existence had been swept away from
one State after another, partly on conscientious, partly on economical
grounds, but its spirit was here, in every sympat