America To-day, Observations and Reflections

avery. There is probably no one in the South who would advocate the reinstatement of that "peculiar institution," even if it could be effected by the lifting of a fing

ny thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States felt the crushing burden and the awful responsib

rief inquiry into this question may be found to have more than a merely historic interest-to have a direct

political aggregations; and the world regards the defeat of the South as righteous and inevitable, because instinct tells it that the welfare of

leading politicians and influential parties in several Northern States, and was therefore no novel and treasonable invention of the South; and, finally, that the right to enter into a compact implied the right to recede from it when its provisions were broken, or obviously on the point of being broken, by the other party or parties to the agreement. All this is logically and historically indisputable. The Southerners were the conservative party, and had the letter of the Constitution on their side; the Northerners were the reformers, the innovators. Entrenched in the theory of State Sovereignty, the South denied the right of the North, acting through the Central Government, to interfere with its "peculiar institution;" and even those who deplored the existence of slavery felt themselves none the less bound to assert and defend the right of their respective States to manage their own affairs.[I] It was a conflict as old as the Revolution-and even, in its germ

tract argument as to the right to secede? Once grant the power to secede, once suffer the precedent to be established, and the greatest democracy the world had ever seen was bound to break up, not only into two, but ultimately into many petty republics, wrangling and jangling like those of Spanish America. To this negation of a great ideal the North refused its consent. National patriotism had outgrown local patriotism. It had become to all intents and purposes a fiction that the Federal Government derived its powers from the States; Thirteen of them, indeed, had sanctioned the Federal Government, but the Federal Government had sanctioned and admitted to the Union twenty-one more. In these the sentiment of

urs of war, commercial conflicts, political complications, frontiers to be safeguarded, bureaucracies to be financed." Of course I do not put this forward as a new interpretation of the question at issue. It is old and it is obvious. But though the national significance of the struggle has long been recognised, I am not sure that its international, its world-historic significa

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t, on the rights of a State, means slavery;" this remark occurring early in an article of twenty

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