Cavalier, the whole race would nevertheless have
undergone a softening change, bringing them in their turn nearer the
type of their old antagonists; and thus each succeeding year would have
seen these two extremes of social life drawing nearer and nearer
together, and at last blending in dull, contented, plodding harmony. And
the result would doubtless have been the degeneration of the entire
race, and our fate that of the Spanish American colonies.

But this did not suit the designs of Providence. It was His purpose that
there should be here those manifold social and political conflicts which
are the life of a great nation--which are, indeed, the motive power to
the wheels of human progress. A great problem in human destiny was here
to be wrought out; a powerful nation was to arise, bearing within itself
the elements of its own continual purification. The Cavalier landed
upon the shores of Virginia, and spread his settlements southward. The
influence of climate upon both the physical and mental constitution of
man is well known. The enervating climate of the 'sunny South,' the soil
fruitful beyond a parallel, pouring forth its products almost
spontaneously, and, above all, the 'peculiar institution,' which
released the planter from the necessity of toil, all tended to aggravate
the peculiarities of mind and body which the settlers inherited from
their ancestors; and the result has been a race which, while it presents
here and there an example of brilliant, meteoric genius, is, in the
main, both intellectually and physically inferior to the hardy denizens
of the North and West. The same influences have fostered the
aristocratic notions of the early settlers of the Southern States. With
every element of a monarchy in their midst, the Gulf States have long
been anything but a republic. De Bow, when, a few years since, he
broached in his Review the idea, and prophesied the establishment of a
monarch in our midst, was but giving expression to a feeling which had
long been dominant in the Southern heart. All their institutions,
associations, and reminiscences have tended steadily to this result, and
in the event of the success of the rebellion, it needs but some bold
apostle to take upon himself the propagation and execution of the plan,
to make the idea a startling reality. And herein lies the secret of the
sympathy of the English aristocracy with the confederates in their
struggle for independent existence.

The Puritan,