litical arrangements of the free States is,
the absence of the aristocratic element. A pure despotism in the hands
of one man has seldom been seen, except in the instances of those
renowned military chiefs, whom a retributive Providence has at intervals
employed as the scourge of guilty nations. An aristocracy under various
forms and names, has usually been the governing power, and as the too
frequent result, laws have been made and administered for the benefit of
the few, and not for the many. Yet the United States of North America
exhibit, however, notwithstanding their political theory to the
contrary, an aristocracy of the worst kind, _an aristocracy of color_;
in the free States of the many against the few, in affirming these to be
a degraded race, as long as African blood runs in their veins; and in
the slave States, for a no better reason, reducing them even when they
are the majority; to the condition of brute beasts, to be held and sold
as goods and chattels. And this leads me to observe that the writer who
mistakes the general government of the confederacy, with its limited
scope and powers, for the chief source of laws and administration in the
separate States will unavoidably present a confused and distorted
representation of existing facts. Each State constitutes within itself a
distinct republic, virtually independent of the general government, so
long as its legislation does not conflict with the specific articles of
the constitutional compact; all the rights and powers of sovereignty,
not specifically delegated to the Government in that instrument, being
retained by the States. Hence nothing can present a wider contrast than
the slavery-blackened code of South Carolina, and the statutes of
Massachusetts, characterized by republican simplicity and equality.

The preceding observations in favor of the democratic institutions of
the northern States, are therefore to be understood as of local
application; and I would explicitly admit that a well-ordered and a
well-working government on such principles must in a great measure
depend upon the amount of virtue and intelligence in the community: but
while a government which is based upon the principles of impartial
justice requires a virtuous people properly to administer it, it has, I
believe, within itself one of the most powerful elements for the
formation of such a community.

On the subject of peace my inquiries elicited an almost uniformly
favorable respo