There’s a little stream of truth trickling over the dam that holds back the flood of the resentment of the people; silently, softly, with an appearance of “apathy,” it began to move, until the rich received the first spray, notifying them of its approach, November the 8th, 1892.
CHAPTER X. THE CAUSE OF BULLETS, ’61; BALLOTS, ’92.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN ’60.
Of political parties in America, De Tocqueville declared that “Aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the United States.”
That greatest conflict of American history, the military and political struggle between the forces of slavery and the forces of human freedom, was no less a conflict between aristocracy and democracy. In the South, which President-elect Cleveland only the other day termed—with undoubted historical accuracy—the cradle of American liberty, there had been developed a social and political aristocracy as distinct and powerful as almost any the world has seen.
To this development, which did not become marked until after the early part of the present century, many causes contributed. The industry of the South had become centralized in the hands of large land owners who cultivated extensive plantations with slave labor. The tremendous growth of slavery exerted a depressing effect upon the manufacturing spirit; the artisan, the mechanic, and the trader came to be regarded as socially inferior. The planting of rice, sugar cane, and especially cotton, which was found to be the most profitable business, was also the most esteemed; and the South became an almost purely agricultural section.
Lorin Blodget lays it down as an accepted rule that “the country wholly devoted to agriculture necessarily tends to aristocratic despotism, or some form of enslavement of the masses;” and he quotes similar expressions from Adam Smith, Buckle, and other recognized authorities on political economy.
Nor are reasons hard to find. De Tocqueville points out that the great guarantees of popular liberty in America are universal education and the general division of landed property. Now, in a purely agricultural country the education of the people is certain to be defective. The population is necessarily dispersed, for where there are no manufactories there can be few towns; and where there are few towns there are fewer and less efficient schools, and libraries and lyceums are practically unknown. Harrison’s “History of Virginia” states that that State had, in 1848, 166,000 youths between seven and sixteen years old, of whom only 40,000 attended any school.
Landed property had naturally tended to fall more and more into a few hands. As John Stuart Mill said of ancient Rome: “When inequality of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in repairing, by industry, the injuries of fortune, its advances are gigantic; the great masses swallow up the smaller. The Roman Empire ultimately became covered with the vast landed possessions of a comparatively few families, for whose luxury, and still more for whose ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the cultivators of the soil were slaves or small tenants in a nearly servile condition.” The description is closely applicable to the landed aristocracy of the South in the years immediately before the war.