no caste which Nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefensible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy under the imputation.
But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry; that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change, — as if the fair hair and skin of those ancestral non Angli sed angeli should crisp into wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can hold any office under the national government, however petty, without an open recantation of those principles which he drew in with his mother’s milk, — those principles which, in the better days of the republic, even a slave-holder could write down in the great charter of our liberties, — those principles which now only the bells and cannon are allowed to utter on the Fourth of July or the Seventeenth of June,—bells that may next call out the citizen-soldiery to aid in the rendition of a slave,—cannon whose brazen lips may next rebuke the freedom whose praises they but yesterday so emptily thundered.
When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared this continent for the experiment of Democracy, — when we think of those forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best blood in the day of her trial, — when we remember the first two acts of our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a new hero to mankind, — we cannot believe it possible that this great scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent, — this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur, Plymouth and Bunker Hill, — is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity, — a republic, and made it anarchy, — freedom, and were content as serfs, — of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. The change is sad ’twixt Now and Then: the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon
