the late war than negro slavery or negro
freedom. That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of
the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves
at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to
do it even at first. This fact alone proves that they had, or believed
they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro
slavery. They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State
sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and
independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their
cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they
had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same
time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
democracy, they would have succeeded. It is not socialism nor
abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered. The
Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both
historically and legally false to say that the South has been
subjugated. The Union has preserved itself and American civilization,
alike for North and South, East and West. The armies that so often met
in the shock of battle were not drawn up respectively by the North and
the South, but by two rival democracies, to decide which of the two
should rule the future. They were the armies of two mutually
antagonistic systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly
conscious of the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it but
dimly discerned. On both sides the cause was broader and deeper than
negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the abolitionists
have won. The territorial democracy alone has won, and won what will
prove to be a final victory over the purely personal democracy, which
had its chief seat in the Southern States, though by no means confined
to them. The danger to American democracy from that quarter is forever
removed, and democracy a la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of it.

But in this world victories are never complete. The socialistic
democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not patriotism,
that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the brave men led by
McClellan, Grant, and