ll its forms of
intelligence, enterprise, wealth, and improvement. Contiguous States,
with separate jurisdictions, admitted a divergence of customs, laws, and
institutions, remarkable in its character, and fraught with momentous
consequences to the whole sisterhood. Nothing like this could have
occurred under the consolidated form. It is true, according to the
principles we have heretofore enounced as having been established by
universal history and experience, slavery must have disappeared
eventually, alike in a consolidated or a federal form of government; for
it is now well understood by all enlightened thinkers, that different
forms of polity may either facilitate or embarrass the natural
development of society, but cannot actually create or altogether destroy
the tendency to improvement. This tendency is innate in man, and
independent of all forms of government, though not wholly unaffected by
them. But in our vast country, under a centralized system, however
democratic, it would have been far more difficult to initiate the work
of emancipation, on account of the magnitude and unity of the power to
be moved, and for want of those _points d'appui_ afforded by the local
organization and independent authority of the states in a confederacy.
Our own experience, and the recent example of Russia, may serve to
convince us that a consolidated representative republic would probably
have been less favorable to the abolition of slavery than an imperial
and despotic government. The serf-owners of Russia, had the question
been submitted to them, would have been as little disposed to vote for
the destruction of their system, as the slave-holders of America have
shown themselves inclined to submit to the voice of the majority under
our republican institutions.

Thus, it was characteristic of our peculiar political forms, that they
gave opportunity for the complete trial of each of the two plans of
social organization which grew out of the early introduction of African
slaves into the colonies. For while it seems to be clear that the
federal system was most favorable to the disappearance of slavery from
those localities where circumstances made emancipation easy and
advantageous, it is equally plain that it afforded full scope to the
growth and influence of the system of servile labor, wherever, from
climatic conditions, it was peculiarly profitable, and otherwise adapted
to the productions of the region, and to the prevailing sen