ight as well blame _you_ for the swing and toss of their craft when
tides troop in or march out of your harbor, as us, for heaving to that
tide which God swells under us. Tides in the ocean and in human
affairs are from celestial bodies and celestial beings. The conflict
which is going on springs from causes as deep as the foundations of
our institutions. It will go on to a crisis; its settlement will be an
era in the world's history, either of advance or of decline.

I wish to call your patient attention to the real nature of this
contest. It is,

_The conflict between Northern theories and Southern theories of man
and of Society._

There have been, from the earliest period of the world, two different,
and oppugnant, doctrines of man--_his place, rights, duties and
relations_. And the theory of man is always the starting point of all
other theories, systems, and Governments which divide the world.

Outside of a Divine and Authoritative Revelation, men have had but one
way of estimating the value of man. He was to them simply a creature
of time, and to be judged in the scientific method, by his
_phenomena_. The Greeks and the Romans had no better way. They did not
know enough of his origin, his nature, or his destiny, to bring these
into account, in estimating man. Accordingly they could do no better
than to study him in his developments and rank him by the POWER which
he manifested. Now if a botanist should describe a biennial plant,
whose root and stem belong to one season, whose blossom and fruit
belong to another, as if that were the whole of it which the first
year produced, he would commit the same mistake which the heathen idea
of man commits in measuring and estimating a being whose true life
comes hereafter, by the developments which he makes in only this
world.

From this earthly side of man springs the most important practical
results. For the doctrine of man, simply as he _is in this life,
logically deduces Absolutism and Aristocracy_.

If the _power of producing effects_ is the criterion of value, the few
will always be the _most_ valuable, and the mass relatively,
subordinate, and the weak and lowest will be left helplessly
worthless.

And the mass of all the myriads that do live, are of no more account
than working animals; and there is, no such a theory, no reason, _a
priori_; why they should not be controlled by superior men, and made
to do that for which they seem the best fitted--Work and Dru