The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 | Page 6

the countless articles that go to make up a well-built and well-furnished modern dwelling. Labor is thus the great social cement; and can any one fail to see that it is upon the basis of such a diversified and interwoven industry that a corresponding multiplicity, intermingling, and union of human relations are established; and also that it is only under free institutions in the enjoyment of equal rights, where all are equal before the law, and where political authority and order emanate from the people themselves, that labor itself can be free; and not only free, but ennobled, and at full liberty to expand itself broadly and widely in all departments, without any conceivable limits? While at the same time, by the interlacing of its countless details, it cements the laborers, the respective communities, the entire nation into a noble brotherhood of useful workers.
We have yet to learn the elevating, refining power of labor, when organized as it can, and assuredly will be. At present we have no adequate conception of this influence. It is solely for the sake of labor, for the sake of human activity, that it may fill as many and as wide and deep channels as possible, and thus permit man's varied life and capacities to flow freely forth, and expand to the utmost; it is solely for this end that all government is instituted; and under a free, popular government, under the guidance of religion and science, labor is destined to reach a degree of development and a perfection of organization, and to exert a reactive influence in ennobling human character that shall surpass the farthest stretch of our present imaginings. Our rare political organization is but the coarse, bold outlines--the rugged trunk and branches of the great tree of liberty. Out of this will grow the delicate and luxuriant foliage of a varied, beautiful, scientific, and dignified industry and social life.
This is the glorious, towering, expanding structure, which the insane rebellion, the dark slave power, is raging to destroy! to tear it, branch by branch, to pieces, and scatter the ruins to the four winds, in order to set up, what? in its place. A foul, decaying object--a slave oligarchy, which, do what it will, is, at each decennial census, seen to fall steadily farther and farther into the rear even of the most laggard of the Free States, in all that goes to make up our American civilization.[1] And all this because it sees that the life of the republic is the death of slavery, and free labor the eternal enemy of slave.
This difference in the conditions of labor, then, forms the third point of antagonism between free and slave institutions.
It is an antagonism that is ever on the increase--ever intensifying, and utterly irremediable in any conceivable way or mode. Much as the nation longs for peace, this is utterly hopeless, let it do what it will--compromise, try arbitration, mediation--nothing can bring lasting peace but the death of slavery. Freedom may be crushed for a season, but as it is the breath of God himself, it will live and struggle on from year to year, and from age to age, and give the world no rest until it has vanquished all opposition, and asserted its divine right to be supreme.
If slave society, therefore, thus necessarily diverges ever farther and farther from the conditions which characterize, and those which result from the operations of free institutions, such society must of course be fast on its way to a monarchical, or even an absolute and despotic government. The whites of the South even now may be considered as separated into two distinct classes--the governing and the governed. The slaveholders are virtually the governing class, through their superior wealth, education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount, leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter bombardment awoke it just in time to see its awful peril and strike out, with God's help, into the free waters once more.
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From these considerations, can we be surprised at the rumors that now and then come from the South, of incipient movements toward a monarchical government? Not at all. Should the rebellion succeed--a supposition which is, of course, not to be harbored for a moment--but in such an improbable contingency there can be hardly a reasonable doubt that a monarchy would be the result. Not probably at first. The individual States would like to amuse