1860] AT COOPER UNION 35
case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.
And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown, Helper's book,* and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box into some other channel ? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation ?
- Hinton R. Helper, a North Carolinian, wrote, in 1857,
"The Impending Crisis of the South : How to Meet It," a book intended to show that slavery was inimical to the interests of the non-slaveholding Southern whites. Of this work, J. F. Rhodes says, in his "History of the United States from 1850":
_ "Although the writer's manner was highly emotional, sincerity flowed from his unpracticed pen. The facts were in the main correct ; the arguments based on them, in spite of being disfigured by abuse of the slave-holders, and weakened by threats, of violent action in a certain contingency, were unanswerable. . . . The burden of Helper's argument was that the abolition of slavery- would improve the material interests of the South by fostering manufactures and commerce, thus greatly increasing the value of land, the only property of the poor whites, and giving them a larger market for their products. The country and the cities would grow ; there would be schools, as at the North, for the education of their children, and their rise in the social scale would be marked. . . . Had the poor whites been able to read and comprehend
