If a peasant, with wife and child toiling in the field, in the cultivation of forty acres of land, raised crops to the value of $640, the king, the lord, and the church, took six hundred dollars of this, and left for the peasant and his ragged, emaciate family, but forty dollars. No allusion was allowed to be made to such wrongs. King, noble, ecclesiastic, alike rose in vengeful remonstrance, exclaiming, "It is political preaching." The old hypocrites! Thomas Jefferson, in the year 1785, wrote from Paris to Mrs. Trist of Philadelphia:

"Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion that there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States."

And yet the Christianity of that day was not allowed to make the slightest reference to such outrages. It was this state of things which inaugurated the French Revolution, the most terrific of all Time's tragcdies. Twenty millions of people, trampled in the mire, rose ghastly and frenzied, and the flames of feudal castles, and the shrieks of haughty oppressors appalled the world. The story of this outburst of enslaved humanity is the most instructive in the annals of nations. That struggle was the most memorable, in the long series of conflicts between aristocratic assumption and popular rights.

All aristocratic Europe then combined to crush the people demanding equality of privilege in the eye of the law, with their lords. The courts of Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, England, Spain,-all the kings and nobles of Europe rallied their armies. The people of France rose, with all the energies of despair, in defense of equality of rights. Such combats earth never saw before, probably never will see again. Two worlds, as it were, came clashing together. All the combined aristocracy of Europe were on the one side. All the masses of the people were on the other side. It was because they believed, right or wrong, that the motto of equal rights for all men, was beaming from the banners of the Empire, that they marched so heroically to the victories of Marengo, Wagram and Austerlitz. And in the final victories of the despots, aristocratic privilege again triumphed in Europe, and "Hope for a season bade the world farewell."

A similar though less sanguinary conflict had previously taken place in England, between the united courtiers and Cavaliers under Charles I., and the Puritans under Cromwell. It was the same irrepressible conflict. The common people of England, slowly emerging from feudal servitude, and gradually acquiring intelligence and property, grew restive under the yoke which the lords had for ages imposed upon them. With prayer, and fasting, and hymn, they drew the sword in defense of equal rights for all, and met their foes at Marston Moor and Naseby. Before the sturdy blows of the Roundheads, the Cavaliers bit the dust. But aristocracy triumphed as Charles II. returned to the throne. Our Puritan fathers were again humiliated, and the foot of the oppressor was upon their heads.

Then it was, in this dark hour of apparently hopeless defeat, that our fathers adopted the heroic resolve, to abandon home and possessions, to cross a stormy ocean of three thousand miles, to exile themselves to the

wilderness of a new world, and here, struggling against famine, a savage foe and hardships of every kind, to found a republic where all men, in the eye of the law should be equal. No privileged class was to be allowed. Education was to be as widely diffused as possible. The poor and the rich were to be alike eligible to all offices of honor and emolument. It was a long stride which they had taken. And yet there still clung to them, some of the prejudices of the old world of aristocratic usurpation, from which they had emerged. The North British Review, in the spirit of that execrable aristocracy which had so long dominated over Europe, condemning the equal rights for all, which Napoleon maintained in France, said:

"If the peasant, the grocer or the tailor, can scrape together a little money, his son receives his training in the same school, as the son of the proprietor whose land he cultivates, whose sugar and coffee he supplies, and whose coat he makes. The boy, who ought to be a laborer, or a petty tradesman, sits on the same bench and learns the same lesson, as the boy who is destined for the bar, the tribune or the civil service of the state. The grocer's son can not see why he should not become an advocate, a journalist, a statesman, as well as the wealthy and noble born lad who was often below him in the class, whom he occasionally thrashed, and often helped over the thorny places of his daily task.”

The aristocracy of England, when they found that a Republic was established in this country, growing rapidly in wealth and power, made a desperate endeavor to bring this partially emancipated people under subjection to their privileged class. They endeavored to tax us, without, allowing us to be represented in parliament-to place the appointment to all important offices, in the hands of the king, who would send over the sons of England's nobles to be our governors and our judges, and who would fill all the posts of wealth, dignity and power with the children of the lords.

Hence the war of the Revolution. It was a continuation of the irrepressible conflict, between aristocratic usurpation and popular rights. We, the people, conquered, and established our Government independent of all the world. Proudly we announced to the nations of Europe, as the corner stone of our edifice, that "all men are born free and equal, and are alike entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Our Constitution in its spirit and legitimate utterance is doubtless the noblest document, which ever emanated from the mind of man. It contains not one word hostile to liberty. Even now, with the light of threefourths of a century shed upon its practical workings, it requires not the change of a paragraph to make it true to humanity.

But yet ingloriously, guiltily, under sore temptation, we consented to use one phrase susceptible of a double meaning, "held to labor." These honest words, at the North mean a hired man, an apprentice. At the South they mean a slave, feudal bondage. So small, apparently so insignificant, were those seeds sown in our Constitution which have resulted in such a harvest of misery. A privileged class at the South, assumed that by these words the Constitution recognised domestic slavery, and the right of property in man. With persistence never surpassed, the Slaveholders

of the South endeavored to strengthen and extend their aristocratic institution, which was dooming ever increasing millions to life-long servitude and degradation. All wealth was rapidly being accumulated in the hands of the privileged few, who owned their fellow men as property. The poor whites, destitute of employment, unable to purchase negroes, and regarding labor, which was performed mostly by slaves, in their region, as degrading, were fast sinking into a state of almost bestial misery.

The sparse population which Slavery allowed, excluded churches, schools and villages. Immense plantations of many thousand acres, tilled sometimes by a thousand slaves, driven to their toil by a few overseers, consigned the whole land to apparent solitude. The log hut of the overseer was surrounded by the miserable cabins of the negroes, and in the workshops of the North all the rude implements of their toil were manufactured. The region of the Southern country generally presented an, aspect of desolation which Christendom could no where else parallel. The Slaveholders, ever acting as one man, claimed the right of extending this institution over all the free territories of the United States. Free labor and Slave labor can not exist together. The New England farmer can not work with his sons in fields surrounded by negro bands, where labor is considered degrading, where his wife and daughters find no congenial society, no education, none of the institutions of religion, none of the appliances and resources of high civilization which freedom secures. The admission of slavery to the Territories effectually excluded freemen from them. The introduction to those vast realms of a privileged class, who were to live in luxury upon the unpaid labor of the masses, rendered it impossible that men cherishing the sentiment of republican equality should settle there.

It was upon this point that the conflict, in its fierceness, commenced. It was to avoid this very trouble of an aristocratic class, in the enjoyment of exclusive privileges, that our fathers fled from Europe. Almost every nation in Europe was represented in our land, by refugees from feudal Europe, seeking liberty and equality of rights, on the free soil of the United States. These men could not consent that they and their children should be excluded from the Territories by the extension over them of the curse of human bondage. They came to this new world, expressly to establish and to maintain free institutions, where every honest man, the poor man's son as well as the rich man's son, the son of the day laborer as well as the son of the merchant prince, the boy born in the log hut as well as the boy born in the mansions of splendor, should be entitled to equal rights in the eye of the law.

All feudal privileges were here to be abolished. The bootblack was to be as much entitled to his dime as the lawyer to his fee. The poor woman who should wash a gentleman's linen, was to have her shillings of pay, just as surely as that gentleman was to receive his thousands, when occupying the senatorial or presidential chair. The servant who groomed the horses and polished the coach of his employer, was to claim his wages as effectually through the laws, as that employer could claim his salary, when occupied in the most responsible posts of the Government.

How just this democratic principle, over arching, as with a sunny sky, all humanity! This was the contemplated corner-stone of our Republic. This was the democracy, sacred, heaven-born, which Jesus Christ taught, and over which our national banner, of the Stars and Stripes, was intended to be unfurled. But Satan sent the serpent of aristocratic usurpation into our Eden, to wilt its flowers and poison its fruit. The execrable spirit, in the most malignant form it had ever developed, came over here, demanding that the rich should live in splendor at the expense of the poor. The rich man's boots were to be polished, as in old baronial Europe, and the poor boy who blacked them was to have no pay. The rich man's coach was to roll luxuriously through the streets, and his linen to be washed, and his fields to be tilled, while the coachman, the laborer and the washerwoman, were to be defrauded of their wages.

The daughter of the rich man, with cultured mind and polished address was to move through saloons of magnificence, robed in fabrics of almost celestial texture, while the daughter of the poor man, dirty and ragged, and almost naked, with one single garment scarce covering her person, was to toil in the field from morning till night, and from youth till old age and death, that her aristocratic sister, very probably in blood relationship her half-sister, the child of the same father, might thus cultivate her mind and decorate her person.

It is impossible that two such antagonistic systems as democratic equality and aristocratic privilege, should live in peace under the same Government, or even side by side. Through all the ages they have kept the world in commotion, and will until doomsday trump shall sound, unless the one or the other gain undisputed ascendency. When France attempted to establish a Republican Empire upon the basis of equal rights for every man who trod her soil, all aristocratic Europe rose in resistance, and millions were marshaled under arms to crush this heaven-born fraternity.

There must be gradations of society. There must be diversities of rank. There must be bootblacks, and coachmen, and day laborers. There must be men to swing the sledge-hammer, as well as men to rule in the senate. There must be men to split rails, as well as men to occupy the presidential chair. True democracy demands only that the smith, and the rail-splitter shall have fair wages for their work, with unobstructed opportunities to improve their condition if they can; that every man shall have fair scope for industry and talent.

The antagonism between these two systems is deadly and universal. The history of the world has proved that there can be no reconciliation between them. From the foundation of our government they have been in a constant battle, growing hotter and hotter every year, until culminating in this bloody rebellion. They have kept Congress, both the Senate and the House, in one incessant scene of warfare. And there can be no peace in our land, until this aristocratic element is banished effectually from our government. There is philosophic truth in the glowing verse of Dr. Pierpont:

"This fratricidal war

Grows on the poisonous tree,
Which God and men abhor,

Accursed Slavery.

And God ordains that we

Shall eat this deadly fruit,
Till we dig up the tree,

And burn its every root."

The Hon. Mr. Iverson, of Georgia, speaking of the antagonism of these two systems, said, in the Senate of the United States, on the 5th of December, 1860:

"Sir, disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Northern and the Southern people, which is deep and enduring, and you never can eradicate it-never. Look at the spectacle exhibited on this floor. How is it? There are the Northern Senators on that side; here the Southern Senators on this side. How much social intercourse is there between us? You sit upon your side, silent and gloomy. We sit upon ours, with knit brows and portentous scowls. Here are two hostile bodies on this floor; and it is but a type of the feeling which exists between the two sections. We are enemies as much as if we were hostile states. We have not lived in peace. We are not now living in peace. It is not expected that we shall ever live in peace."

Hon. Mr. Mason, of Virginia, said, in the continuation of the same debate, "This is a war of sentiment and opinion, by one form of society against another form of society."

The remarks of the IIon. Garret Davis, a Senator from Kentucky, are instructive and to the point. "The Cotton States, by their slave labor, have become wealtliy, and many of their planters have princely revenues -from $50,000 to $100,000 a year. This wealth has begot pride, and insolence, and ambition, and these points of the Southern character have been displayed most insultingly in the halls of Congress. As a class, the wealthy cotton growers are insolent, they are proud, they are domineering, they are ambitious. They have monopolized the government in its honors, for forty or fifty years, with few interruptions. When they saw the sceptre about to depart from them, in the election of Lincoln, sooner than give up office and the spoils of office, in their mad and wicked ambition they determined to disrupt the old Confederation, and erect a new one wherein they would have undisputed power. Nine out of ten of the Northern people were sound upon the subject. They were opposed to the extension of Slavery, and I do not condemn them for that; but they were willing to accord to the Slaveholders all their constitutional rights.'

There is indeed one cause, and but one cause, for this animosity. It is the antagonism between the system of aristocratic privilege and democratic equality. One takes a very narrow view of this question, in regarding it as one which affects a particular race, the African alone. It is as broad as humanity. This question of races is merely one of science, not of morals. Blumenbach endeavors to class the human family into five different varieties: 1. The Caucasian or European. 2. The Tartar. 3. The American Indian. 4. The Malay. 5. The Negro. But this division is