ould not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an
element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional
right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they
demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean
work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.

The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding
its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds. Slavery is really
a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American
civilization. The whole force of the national life opposes it, and
must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean
proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of
modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their
prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with
cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the
anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy. They
studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that
those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in
spite of slavery. They failed to take into the account the fact that
when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they
were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times,
they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized
nations of all times. They failed also to perceive that, if the
Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in
the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the
territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on
pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell,
and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism
within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.
The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves
were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
master. The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every
species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.

It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the
real issue is distinctly presented, or the p