r were not less conflicting. The competition
between free and forced labour, side by side on the same continent,
was bound in itself, sooner or later, to breed dissension; and if it
had not yet reached an acute stage, it had at least created a certain
degree of bitter feeling. But more than all--and the fact must be
borne in mind if the character of the Civil War is to be fully
appreciated--the natural ties which should have linked together the
States on either side of Mason and Dixon's line had weakened to a
mere mechanical bond. The intercourse between North and South, social
or commercial, was hardly more than that which exists between two
foreign nations. The two sections knew but little of each other, and
that little was not the good points but the bad.

For more than fifty years after the election of the first President,
while as yet the crust of European tradition overlaid the young
shoots of democracy, the supremacy, social and political, of the
great landowners of the South had been practically undisputed. But
when the young Republic began to take its place amongst the nations,
men found that the wealth and talents which led it forward belonged
as much to the busy cities of New England as to the plantations of
Virginia and the Carolinas; and with the growing sentiment in favour
of universal equality began the revolt against the dominion of a
caste. Those who had carved out their own fortunes by sheer hard work
and ability questioned the superiority of men whose positions were no
guarantee of personal capacity, and whose wealth was not of their own
making. Those who had borne the heat and burden of the day deemed
themselves the equals and more than equals of those who had loitered
in the shade; and, esteeming men for their own worth and not for that
of some forgotten ancestor, they had come to despise those who toiled
not neither did they spin. Tenaciously the Southerners clung to the
supremacy they had inherited from a bygone age. The contempt of the
Northerner was repaid in kind. In the political arena the struggle
was fierce and keen. Mutual hatred, fanned by unscrupulous agitators,
increased in bitterness; and, hindering reconciliation, rose the
fatal barrier of slavery.

It is true that, prior to 1860, the abolitionists were not numerous
in the North; and it is equally true that by many of the best men in
the South the institution which had been bequeathed to them was
thoroughly detested. Looking back ove