largely
as in the South. In such communities the seeds of an "irrepressible
conflict" are purely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily
multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked
for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of
intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the
richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness.

The election in November turns on the single and simple question,
Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and
the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against
such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor
of it, is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted
that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess
that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward
since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater
ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr.
Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for
passing him by,--that he represented the most advanced doctrines of
his party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the
moralist's oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment
of it as a theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,--thus
summing up the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and
concentrated the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man,
he has that best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of
being always able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of
his opinions which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect
of his speeches in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to
their power. Safe from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional
eloquence as if he had been inoculated for it early in his career, he
addresses himself to the reason, and what he says sticks. It was
assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest and
tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We
cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by
sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain
office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest
purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction. It was
not cal