It is an antagonism that is ever on the increase—ever intensifying, and utterly irremediable in any conceivable way or mode. Much as the nation longs for peace, this is utterly hopeless, let it do what it will—compromise, try arbitration, mediation—nothing can bring lasting peace but the death of slavery. Freedom may be crushed for a season, but as it is the breath of God himself, it will live and struggle on from year to year, and from age to age, and give the world no rest until it has vanquished all opposition, and asserted its divine right to be supreme.
If slave society, therefore, thus necessarily diverges ever farther and farther from the conditions which characterize, and those which result from the operations of free institutions, such society must of course be fast on its way to a monarchical, or even an absolute and despotic government. The whites of the South even now may be considered as separated into two distinct classes—the governing and the governed. The slaveholders are virtually the governing class, through their superior wealth, education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount, leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter bombardment awoke it just in time to see its awful peril and strike out, with God's help, into the free waters once more.
From these considerations, can we be surprised at the rumors that now and then come from the South, of incipient movements toward a monarchical government? Not at all. Should the rebellion succeed—a supposition which is, of course, not to be harbored for a moment—but in such an improbable contingency there can be hardly a reasonable doubt that a monarchy would be the result. Not probably at first. The individual States would like to amuse themselves awhile with the game of secession, and the joys of independent sovereignty, State rights, etc., as Georgia has already begun to do, in nullifying the conscription law on their bogus congress. But eventually their mutual jealousies, their 'quick sense of honor,' their contentious and intestine wars (and nothing else can reasonably be looked for) will bring them under an absolute monarchy, more or less arbitrary, or under the yoke of some foreign power.
The antagonism between free and slave institutions, which we have inferred, from a glance at the peculiar workings of each, finds its complete confirmation in certain statements made by Mr. Calhoun, some twenty years ago, which were to this effect, viz.:
'Democracy in the North is engendering social anarchy; it is tending to the loosening of the bonds of society. Society is not governed by the will of a mob, but by education and talent. Therefore the South, resting on slavery as a stable foundation, is a principle of authority: it must restrain the North; must resist the anarchical influence of the North; must counterbalance the dissolving influence of the North. He upheld slavery because it was a bulwark to counterbalance the dissolving democracy of the North; that the dissolving doctrines of democracy took their rise in England, passed into France, and caused the French Revolution; that they have been carried out in the democracy of the North, and will there ultimate in revolution, anarchy, and dissolution.' (Taken from Horace Greeley, in Independent of December 25th, 1862.)
These are Mr. Calhoun's own words, and he will probably be allowed to be a fair exponent of Southern sentiment: we may gather from these utterances how the free republicanism of the North is regarded by the slave oligarchy.
We cannot forbear adding another statement of Mr. Calhoun, made to Commodore Stuart, as far back as 1812, in a private conversation at Washington, which was in substance as follows, viz.: That the South, on account of slavery, found it necessary to ally herself with one of the political parties; but that if ever events should so turn out as to break this alliance, or cause that the South could not control the Government, that then it would break it up.
Comment upon this is unnecessary. Let no loyal man forget these expressions; they reveal the egg from whence, after fifty years' incubation, this rebellion has been hatched.