arried on from the
formation of the Constitution until the secession of the South.

During the first half of this century Southern statesmen had demanded
and secured equality of representation in the Senate. Its loss in
1850 was among the causes which led them to revolt against National
authority. But even the equality of representation was for a section
and not for a party, and its existence did not prevent the free play
of contests on other issues. Partisan divisions in the South upon
tariff, upon bank, upon internal improvement, between Whig on the one
side and Democrat on the other, were as marked as in the North.
Southern men of all parties would unite against the admission of a
Northern State until a Southern State was ready to offset its vote in
the Senate, but they never sought to compel unity of opinion
throughout all Southern States upon partisan candidates or upon public
measures. The evident policy in the South since the close of the civil
war has been, therefore, of a more engrossing and more serious
character. It comprehends nothing less than the absolute consolidation
of sixteen States,--not by liberty of speech, or public discussion,
or freedom of suffrage, but by a tyranny of opinion which threatens
timid dissentients with social ostracism and suppresses the bolder
form of opposition by force.

The struggle which this policy invites, nay which it enforces, is as
much a moral as a political struggle. It is not a contention over
measures. It is a contest for equal rights under the Constitution, for
simple justice between citizens of the same Republic. Nor is the
struggle hopeless. Re-action will come in the South itself. The
passion and prejudice which influence men who were defeated in the
war cannot be transmitted to succeeding generations. Principle will
re-assert itself; local and state interest will command a change.
The signs even now are hopeful. The personal relations between men of
the South and men of the North are more amicable than they have been
for sixty years. Diversity of employment, the spirit of industrial
enterprise, the unification of financial interests, will tend more and
more to assimilate the populations, more and more to enforce an
agreement, if not as to measures, yet assuredly as to methods. No man
in the North, valuing the freedom for which a great war was waged,
desires to control the vote of a single individual in the South. He
only desires that every individ