o do these
things whenever they please. And though public sentiment is better
than law, yet as no public sentiment on earth is a match for legalized
lust, or avarice, or the grip of misfortune, these things are
continually done, and remorselessly. Cruelty, chastity, virtue, do not
mean the same things in the South as in the North. A man is not
blemished by deeds and indulgencies, upon a plantation, among slaves,
which in the North, would strike him through with infamy and house him
in the penitentiary.

In the South, there are many roads leading from the top of society to
the bottom, but not _one_, not ONE from the bottom to the top.

In the North, if the citizen chooses to walk in it, _there is a road
from every man's door_ up to the Governor's chair or the Presidential
seat!

It needs no words, now, to convince you, that out of such different
theories of men, there will exist in the North and in the South,
extremely different ideas of Society, Government, and Public Policy.

In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual
man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the
strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions. Then comes
the township, which presents the only spectacle of an absolute
political democracy. For, here only, do citizens assemble in mass and
vote, directly and not by representation. Next comes Society at large,
or the mass of citizens grouped into States. And in Society, in the
North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous
forces. Wealth, experience, ability set men above their fellows. There
they stand as long as there is a _real_ superiority. But they stand
there, not by legal force, nor to exercise any legal power, or to have
one single privilege or prerogative, which does not belong just as
much to every citizen clear down to the bottom. All that a class
_means_ in the North is, that when men have shown themselves strong
and wise men give them honor for it. Death levels it all down again.
Their children inherit nothing. They must earn for themselves. There
is no division of society into orders, by which some have privilege
and some have not, some have opportunity and advantages which others
have not.

In the South, society is divided into two great and prominent
classes--the ruling and the obeying--the thinking and the working. The
labor of the South is performed by three million creatures who
represent the heathen idea o