teadily farther and farther into the rear even of the most laggard
of the Free States, in all that goes to make up our American
civilization.[1] And all this because it sees that the life of the
republic is the death of slavery, and free labor the eternal enemy of
slave.

This difference in the conditions of labor, then, forms the third point
of antagonism between free and slave institutions.

It is an antagonism that is ever on the increase--ever intensifying, and
utterly irremediable in any conceivable way or mode. Much as the nation
longs for peace, this is utterly hopeless, let it do what it
will--compromise, try arbitration, mediation--nothing can bring lasting
peace but the death of slavery. Freedom may be crushed for a season, but
as it is the breath of God himself, it will live and struggle on from
year to year, and from age to age, and give the world no rest until it
has vanquished all opposition, and asserted its divine right to be
supreme.

If slave society, therefore, thus necessarily diverges ever farther and
farther from the conditions which characterize, and those which result
from the operations of free institutions, such society must of course be
fast on its way to a monarchical, or even an absolute and despotic
government. The whites of the South even now may be considered as
separated into two distinct classes--the governing and the governed. The
slaveholders are virtually the governing class, through their superior
wealth, education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as
virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount,
leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging
every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any
movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything
must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into
which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter
bombardment awoke it just in time to see its awful peril and strike out,
with God's help, into the free waters once more.

* * * * *

From these considerations, can we be surprised at the rumors that now
and then come from the South, of incipient movements toward a
monarchical government? Not at all. Should the rebellion succeed--a
supposition which is, of course, not to be harbored for a moment--but in
such an improbable contingency there can be hardly a reasonable doub