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

brings out and develops more and more of man's nature, must, as a
natural result, ever also multiply his wants. These multiplying wants
can be satisfied for each individual only by the diversified activities of
multitudes of his fellows; the results of whose united labors, brought to
his door, are seen in 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.
* * * * *
From these considerations, can we be surprised at the rumors that now
and then come from the