acy as the most grinding of aristocracies.'

In those regions where it is not profitable, the population
regard it with a latent abhorrence, compared with which the
rhetorical and open invectives of Garrison and Phillips are
feeble and tame. Anybody who has read Olmsted's truthful
narrative of his experience in the slave States can not doubt
this fact. The hatred to slavery too often finds its expression
in an almost inhuman hatred of 'niggers,' whether slave or free,
but it is none the less significant of the feelings and opinions
of the white population.

As I write, every fresh thunder of war and crash of victory is followed
by murmurs of amazement at the enthusiastic receptions which the Union
forces meet in most unexpected strongholds of the enemy, in the very
heart of slavedom. Yet it was _known_ months ago, and prophesied, with
the illustration of undeniable facts, that this counter-revolutionary
element existed. One single truth was forgotten,--that these Southern
friends of the Union, even while avowing that slavery must be supported,
had no love of it in their hearts. Emancipation has been sedulously set
aside under pretence of conciliating them; but it was needless,--'old
custom' had made them cautious, and mindful of 'expediency;' but the
mass of them hate 'the institution.' It is for the traitorous Northern
_dough-faces_, and the paltry handful of secessionists, 'on a thin slip
of land on the Atlantic,' that slavery is, at present, cherished. The
great area of the South is free from it,--and ever will be.

It has frequently been insisted on that the mere _geographical_
obstacles to disunion are such as to render the cause of slavery
hopeless in the long run. Yet to this most powerful Southern aid to the
North, men seem to have been strangely blind during the days of doubt
which so long afflicted us. These obstacles are, briefly, the enormous
growing power of the West, and its inevitable outlet, the Mississippi
river. 'For it is the mighty and free _West_ which will always hang like
a lowering thunder-cloud over them.'[N] On this subject I quote at
length from an article, in the Danville (Ky.) _Review_, by the Rev. R.
J. Breckenridge, D.D.:--

Whoever will look at a map of the United States, will observe
that Louisiana lies on both sides of the Mississippi river, and
that the States of Arkansas and Mississippi lie on the right and
left banks of this g