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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
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