the
people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of
it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy.

This great people was not plunged into civil war by unfriendly talking,
or by the unfriendly legislation of the Northern people, or by the
accidental election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Nations do not go
to war for hard words or trifling acts of unfriendliness or accidental
political changes; although these may be the ostensible causes of
war--the sparks that finally explode the magazine. There was a real
cause for this rebellion--_the peaceful, constitutional triumph of the
people over the aristocracy of the republic, after a struggle of eighty
years_. If ever a great oligarchy had good reason to fight, it was the
Slave Power in 1860. It found itself defeated and condemned to a
secondary position in the republic, with the assurance that its death
was only a question of time. It is always a good cause of war to an
aristocracy that its power is abridged; for an aristocracy cares only
for itself, and honestly regards its own supremacy as the chief interest
on earth. This Slave Power has only done what every such power has done
since the foundation of the world. It has drawn the sword against the
inevitable progress of mankind, and will be conquered by mankind. It is
waging this terrible war, not against Northern Abolitionists, or the
present Administration, _but against the United States census tables of
1860_; against the mighty realities of the progress of free society in
the republic, which have startled us all; but with which no class of men
were so well acquainted as Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates in
rebellion.

There has always been a conflict in our country between this old slave
aristocracy and the people. The first great victory of the people was in
the war of the Revolution. That war was inaugurated and forced upon the
country by the masses of the people of the New England and Middle
States. The aristocracy of the South, with their associates in the
North, resisted the movement to separate the people from the crown of
Great Britain, till resistance was impossible, and then came in, to some
extent, to lead the movement and appropriate the rewards of success. But
the free people of the North brought on and sustained the war.
Massachusetts was then the fourth province in population; but she sent
eight thousand more soldiers to the field during those bloody eight
years than