sts between the Spartans and
the Athenians. It is not in either case the simple fact of human slavery
which necessitates the civil strife, but it is the radical opposition
between _a government that is founded upon slavery_ and one which is
not. The Athenians had slaves; and so, for that matter, might New
England have to-day: yet, for all that, the civil strife would have been
inevitable, because both in Greece and America this strife evidently
arises out of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based
upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all,
exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical
social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract
justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into
conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as _a peculiar
institution_, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity,
_must_ come into conflict with the totally opposite institutions of
democracy, and that not because it is merely or nominally slavery,
but because it is a political organ modifying the entire structure of
government. Slavery, as it existed in Athens, slavery, as it existed
formerly in the Northern States, was in everything, except its name and
accidents, consistent with democracy; and, in either case, to dispense
with the institution was to introduce no radical change, but only to do
away with the name and accidents.[A]

[Footnote A: Here, however, the reader must understand that the infernal
system of slave-stealing is left entirely out of the account.]

In Sparta, or in the South, the case was far otherwise. Here, slavery
existed in its strict severity; it came into being in connection with
material conditions,--that is, in connection with a soil especially
favorable to agriculture,--and it maintained its existence by reason of
its fitness, its indispensableness, to certain social conditions; it
could not, therefore, be changed or annulled without running counter
both to the inveterate tendencies of Nature and the still more
inveterate tendencies of habit. This difference between the two estates
of slavery is evident also from the fact, that, while, in the one case,
the law would admit of no emancipation, in the other, the emancipation
was effected legally, either in the lump, as in New England, or by
instalments, as in Athens; and in the latter State we must remember that
the process was render