so-called Confederate
States, which is virtually a strife between Free Labor seeking to
enlarge its sphere and retain its power against agricultural aristocracy
maintained by slave labor. All the energies and theories of industrial
progress, of science, and of constant intellectual development; in a
word, all that is most characteristic of 'the spirit of the Nineteenth
Century,' is enlisted on the one side; all that is fading out and
wearing away, with all that characterizes the unwisest conservatism has
taken its last stand on the other. It is the old story of 'the
generation which comes and of that which goes,' reduced to the intense
form of a fierce fight. All of this--but little understood within a very
few years--has been of late made generally intelligible on this side of
the border, thanks, perhaps, as much to Mr. Hammond's word 'mudsill' as
to any other cause. In the short sentence which declared that there
should always exist, in every community, one ever-sunken and permanently
degraded class, the great point of difference between the South and
North was set forth in a form intelligible to the humblest capacity, and
it _was_ understood--how well has been shown in many a bloody field.

The other crisis in which we are at present involved is domestic and
purely political. It is the growth of opposing political parties, and
its existence is undoubtedly to be regretted, if we take only a
_superficial_ view of the causes of its birth. We could all wish for
some time to come--perhaps forever--to see only a single Union-party,
with all men, looking neither to the right nor the left, pushing
steadily on to the great goal of unity, commercial development, and
social progress. But we forget that so surely as night follows day, even
so surely, in every community, will there be a conservative section and
a progressive; the 'extreme right' of the former consisting of frozen
conservatives, advocating the preservation of every antiquated evil,
because it has acquired in their eyes a halo of 'respectability,' while
on the 'extreme left' of their opponents will be found the radical
innovators, for whom no extravagance of reform is too great; so that as
each molecule or group of atoms has its positive and negative electrical
point, and as each atom in turn obeys the same law, so we see the
positive and negative poles of North and South again reflected in the
rapidly increasing divisions among us of Conservatives, who, by a
singu