But they are politically united. They come together into one Congress. There these antagonistic principles, which creep with subtle influence through the very veins of their respective States, break out into open collision upon every question of national policy. And, since the world began, a republican spirit 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 Massachusetts, the mother of the Revolution, every league of whose soil swells with the tomb of some heroic patriot, shall make pilgrimages through the South, and, after surveying the lot of slaves under a system that turns them out of manhood, pronounces them chattles, denies them marriage, makes their education a penal and penitentiary offence, makes no provision for their religious culture, leaving it to the stealth of good men, or the interest of those who regard religion as a currycomb, useful in making sleek and nimble beasts—a system which strikes through the fundamental instincts of humanity, and wounds nature in the core of the human heart, by taking from parents all right in their children, and leaving the family, like a bale of goods, to be unpacked, and parceled out and sold in pieces, without any other protection than the general good nature of easy citizens; what shall be thought of the condition of the public mind in Boston, when one of her most revered, and personally, deservedly beloved pastors, has come up so profoundly ignorant of what we thought every child knew, that he comes home from this pilgrimage, to teach old New-England to check her repugnance to Slavery, to dry up her tears of sympathy, and to take comfort in the assurance that Slavery, on the whole, is as good or better for three millions of laboring men as liberty. He has instituted a formal comparison between the state of society and the condition of a laboring population in a slave system and those in a free State, and left the impression on every page that Liberty works no better results than servitude, and that it has mischiefs and inconveniences which Slavery altogether avoids.
Read that book in Faneuil Hall, and a thousand aroused and indignant ghosts would come flocking there, as if they heard the old roll-call of Bunker Hill. Yea, read those doctrines on Bunker Hill—and would it flame or quake? No. It would stand in silent majesty, pointing its granite finger up to Heaven and to God—an everlasting witness against all Slavery, and all its abettors or defenders.
At this moment, the former parties that have stood in counterpoise have fallen to pieces. And we are on the eve, and in the very act, of reconstructing our parties. One movement there is that calls itself American. Oh, that it were or or would be! Never was an opening so auspicious for a true American party that, embracing the principles of American institutions, should enter our Temple of Liberty and drive out thence not merely the interloping Gentiles, but the money-changers, and those, also, who sell oxen, and cattle and slaves therein.