attract and keep together the people by mental and material chains and links, like those in other states and nations, directing, and giving impulsion, nay even absorbing the various activities of the population. Upon such centres depended and still depend the societies of the European world; these centres have various names and functions; they form the authoritative pivots on which turn and group the whole system of social forces. They are the foci of light, the hearts or the heads of the social bodies. Society and its philosophers still firmly believe in their unavoidable necessity. It would seem therefore that the American communities ought to dissolve, being continually under the centrifugal action of those atoms of independent, individual sovereignty. But as attraction is the all-powerful, albeit invisible band of the sidereal and planetary creation; so the free association and combination of forces, of interests, of rights and of duties,—and the generality of mental culture, those fruits of freedom-are the invisible cements of the American communities.

Self-government is the healthy, everlasting maturity, is the full manhood of man in the social state. All faculties and powers develope themselves therein to a vigorous activity. Youthful not senile maturity is the cardinal condition of progress and growth in the mental as in the material world. On youthful maturity therefore depends the mental development, as well as the destinies of society. All the great actions in history, as well as nearly all great ideas, conceptions, discoveries, the loftiest inspirations in arts and poetry, have been accomplished in the prime of years, and before the turn, the approach to old age. Selfgoverning society alone can, so to say, arrest and perpetuate the duration of this pithy and rich social and mental productivity; an epoch for man as well as for society, of lofty and generous impulses, of high creations and noble

and salutary decisions. Senility in man or society produces diffidence and pusillanimity, conceit and inactivity, extinguishes faith in ideas and convictions, and attempts to arrest movement and progress, to bring the world of ideas and of creative productions, together with the social development, to a stand-still, to reduce all in nature to a routine. Senility alone despairs of the efficacy of selfgovernment.

The pliancy, elasticity and expansiveness of self-government render it eminently adapted to self-development and to higher progressive solutions. Thus already the new States growing up in the West, in many of their constitutive structures and institutions, show a progress over their models in the East, adapting them to new combinations and conditions. These Western States, the purest offshoots of national self-consciousness, assert their origin more boldly than their generators. They have no other traditions, no past, no historical connection with the colonial state of dependency in political, any more than in mental and material relations. In the West, therefore, is to be given the fullest expression and solution of all the mental and social terms and combinations evoked, created by the inauguration of this new epoch of pure self-governing democracy. No definitive progress or amelioration hitherto marks any of the liberal European institutions, modelled either on the English type or on that of the French era of 1793. And the reason may be, that those imitations are always introduced ready-made, and introduced authoritatively, either by kings or by social or political reformers and theorists, without direct participation of the people, of the public reason and sense. But each new constitution of a free self-governing State, framed by the direct action of the people, is generally a marked amelioration, and contains a broader conception of wants

as well as of conditions, than did the older preceding

ones.

Self-government therefore, in the succession of ages, considered as an effort of humanity for the advancement and amelioration of her social structure and relations, is the highest product, soaring above all its preceding forms; forms more or less vital and inherent to society, and all which in given epochs served to facilitate or protect its growth and development. Self-government stands firmly the test of philosophical analysis, answers the most transcendent speculations. And if humanity is to be modelled according to abstract types, self-government is its present most perfect typical form. It stands the test and the trial of practical execution and application, as well as that even of the most practical and direct availability. It may have its epochs of terrible and dangerous probation, of tension and even of crepitation; but such menacing epochs a common lot of vigor and life-will find in the principle itself the soothing cure. Its imperfections and deficiencies disappear when compared with the pre-existent social forms, and can only be found salient when compared with a new and higher standard, and thus for the time a relatively ideal one. All the other social constitutive ideas of the past are exhausted, effete, worn out, degenerated, disordered, honey-combed through and through, and finally powerless and unproductive. All of them look up from below to the American system, expecting from it a higher solution and salvation, all-whatever may be the conceit and the hypocrisy of their representatives and mouth-pieces-acknowledge that the American original self-governing system has already reached regions of higher purity and serenity, and accordingly more favorable to the health and development of the human race.

CHAPTER V.

SLAVERY.

It is the lot of the American Union to represent man in his highest and nearly typical social development, by the side of the most appalling degradation. It is the lot of American institutions to evince that the noblest realization of freedom, the purest conception of manhood hitherto known, can be marred, distorted and prostituted. At the side of the highest solutions attainable by society in its present stage, as manifested in democracy, in self-government, in the elevation and consecration of labor in its allembracing sense, as the loftiest socfal function, there stands Slavery, with its degrading, agonizing contradictions.

There it stands, bidding defiance to the moral sense of humanity, to religious conceptions, to civilization, to social progress;-bidding defiance to the universal condemnation transmitted by past ages, and repeated more and more loudly by the European, that is, by the civilized world. There it stands, perverting and debasing all the cardinal notions of American social and political association; notions which alone constitute its intrinsic worth. There stands slavery, poisoning in the substance the promises anticipated by our race, from the fruition of seeds which have been here scattered broadcast by reason, conscience and freedom.

Slavery, as now maintained in the States of the Union, as it has eaten itself, not only into the political and municipal institutions, but into social, domestic and family life, into the mind, the conscience, the judgment, the reasonings, the religion, the human and animal feelings, the comprehension of the rights, obligations, and duties of a man, of a citizen, of a member of society, as it has permeated those devoted to its growth and preservation;-in one word, this modern American slavery differs wholly from what, under a similar name, has prevailed during past ages in Asia or Europe. It bears no resemblance to the slavery of antiquity, nor to the slavery and serfdom known in Europe. From the legendary or historical origin of society in the remotest antiquity, from the primitive formation of nations and empires in the East, down to Greece, Rome and modern Europe, never has slavery been made the paramount condition and question of social structure, of political and domestic economy. Nowhere has slavery so fully overloaded and absorbed the political atmosphere as in the American Commonwealth. Nowhere does its hideous speetre face the investigator, the observer, on every step, in every political move, development or complication. Nowhere has slavery been the source, the reason or the occasion for struggles between states, friendly or inimical. Never has it formed the main attraction for obtaining the supreme power, or has it been the final object for the direction of the internal and external affairs of a nation. The conquerors of the past, from the mythical Nimrod to the last of the Roman Emperors, those who tower over the history of European nations, did not levy wars and imbrue the earth, did not overthrow empires, subduing nations and territories, for the sake of extending domestic and municipal slavery. In all times, in all nations, in all religions, in all theories, slavery has been consid