ever, the Lincoln debate compelled him to abandon it, and in his
speech of October 25 he confined himself to the discussion of the two
radically different political systems that divided the North and the
South.

[Footnote 497: James S. Pike, _First Blows of the Civil War_, p. 379.]

[Footnote 498: Warden, _Life of Chase_, p. 343.]

The increase in population and in better facilities for internal
communication, he declared, had rapidly brought these two systems into
close contact, and collision was the result. "Shall I tell you what
this collision means? They who think it is accidental, unnecessary,
the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore
ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the
United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a
slave-holding nation, or entirely a free labour nation. Either the
cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of
Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labour, and Charleston and
New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the
rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New York must again
be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production
of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade
in the bodies and souls of men."[499]

[Footnote 499: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 351.]

It was one of the most impressive and commanding speeches that had
ever come from his eloquent lips, but there was nothing new in it. As
early as 1848 he had made the antagonism between freedom and slavery
the leading feature of a speech that attracted much attention at the
time, and in 1856 he spoke of "an ancient and eternal conflict between
two entirely antagonistic systems of human labour." Indeed, for ten
years, in company with other distinguished speakers, he had been
ringing the changes on this same idea. Only four months before,
Lincoln had proclaimed that "A house divided against itself cannot
stand."[500] Yet no one had given special attention to it. But now the
two words, "irrepressible conflict," seemed to sum up the antipathy
between the two systems, and to alarm men into a realisation of the
real and perhaps the immediate danger that confronted them.
"Hitherto," says Frederick W. Seward in the biography of his father,
"while it was accepted and believed by those