, for the office they have assumed. Some services of their
own or of their ancestors to the state, some superiority, natural or
acquired, of parts or skill, at least some specialty of high culture
and elegant breeding, a quick sense of honor, a jealousy of insult to
the public, an impatience of personal stain,--some or all of these
qualities, appealing to the gratitude or to the imagination of the
masses, have usually been supposed to inhere in the class they permit
to rule over them. By virtue of some or all of these things, its
members have had allowed to them their privileges and their
precedency, their rights of exemption and of preeminence, their voice
potential in the councils of the state, and their claim to be foremost
in its defence in the hour of its danger. Some ray of imagination
there is, which, falling on the knightly shields and heraldic devices
that symbolize their conceded superiority, at least dazzles the eyes
and delights the fancy of the crowd, so as to blind them to the
inhering vices and essential fallacies of the Order to whose will they
bow.

But no such consolations of delusion remain to us, as we stand face to
face with the Power which holds our destinies in its hand. None of
these blear illusions can cheat our eyes with any such false
presentments. No antiquity hallows, no public services consecrate, no
gifts of lofty culture adorn, no graces of noble breeding embellish
the coarse and sordid oligarchy that gives law to us. And in the
blighting shadow of Slavery letters die and art cannot live. What book
has the South ever given to the libraries of the world? What work of
art has she ever added to its galleries? What artist has she produced
that did not instinctively fly, like Allston, to regions in which
genius could breathe and art was possible? What statesman has she
reared, since Jefferson died and Madison ceased to write, save those
intrepid discoverers who have taught that Slavery is the corner-stone
of republican institutions, and the vital element of Freedom herself?
What divine, excepting the godly men whose theologic skill has
attained to the doctrine that Slavery is of the essence of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ? What moralist, besides those ethic doctors who teach
that it is according to the Divine Justice that the stronger race
should strip the weaker of every civil, social, and moral right? The
unrighteous partiality, extorted by the threats of Carolina and
Georgia in 1788, which g