t is unfit to secure power. It degenerates it
in the many. But an aristocratic spirit always has aptitude and
impulse toward power. It seeks and grasps it as naturally as a hungry
lion prowls and grasps its prey.

For fifty years the imperious spirit of the South has sought and
gained power. It would have been of but little consequence were that
power still republican. The seat of empire may be indifferently on the
Massachusetts Bay or the Ohio, on the Lakes or on the Gulf; if it be
the same empire, acting in good faith for the same democratic ends.

But in the South the growth of power has been accompanied by a marked
revolution in political faith, until now the theory of Mr. Calhoun,
once scouted, is becoming the popular belief. And that theory differs
in nothing from outright European Aristocracy, save in the forms and
instruments by which it works.

The struggle, then, between the North and the South is not one of
sections, and of parties, but of _Principles_--of principles lying at
the foundations of governments--of principles that cannot coalesce,
nor compromise; that must hate each other, and contend, until the one
shall drive out the other.

Oh! how little do men dream of the things that are transpiring about
them! In Luther's days, how little they knew the magnitude of the
results pending that controversy of fractious monk and haughty pope!
How little did the frivolous courtier know the vastness of that
struggle in which Hampden, Milton and Cromwell acted! We are in just
such another era. Dates will begin from the period in which we live!

Do not think that all the danger lies in that bolted cloud which
flashes in the Southern horizon. There is decay, and change, here in
the North. Old New-England, that suckled American liberty, is now
suckling wolves to devour it.

What shall we think when a President of old Dartmouth College goes
over to Slavery, and publishes to the world his religious conviction
of the rightfulness of it, as a part of God's disciplinary government
of the world--wholesome to man, as a punishment of sins which he never
committed, and to liquidate the long arrearages of Ham's everlasting
debt! and avowing that, under favorable circumstances, he would buy
and own slaves! A Southern volcano in New-Hampshire, pouring forth the
lava of despotism in that incorrupt, and noble old fortress of
liberty! What a College to educate our future legislators!

What are we to think, when old Massachuse