till their own fields, are to stand them in greatest stead.  We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put the living value of industry above the dead value of capital.  Our republic was not born under Cancer, to go backward.  Perhaps we do not like the prospect?  Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with which novelists and poets have invested the old feudal order of things?  That is not the question.  This New World of ours is to be the world of great workers and small estates.  The freemen whose capital is their two hands must inevitably become hostile to a system clumsy and barbarous like that of Slavery, which only carries to its last result the pitiless logic of selfishness, sure at last to subject the toil of the many to the irresponsible power of the few.

It may temporarily avail the Party of Slavery-Extension to announce itself as the party of the white man, of the sacredness of property, and the obligation of law; it may draw to their ranks a few well-meaning persons, whose easy circumstances make them uneasy,—­a few leaders of defunct parties, with a general capacity for misdirection and nobody to misdirect; but it will avail the Republican Party more to claim and to prove that it is the party of Man, no matter what his color or creed or race,—­of the sacredness of that property which every human being has in himself,—­and of the obligation of that law which outlives legislatures and statute-books, and is the only real security of all law.  The cry of “Conservatism” may be efficacious for a season; but time will make plainer and plainer the distinction between the false conservatism which for its own benefit would keep things as they are, which smooths imminent ruin delusively over, as Niagara is smoothest on the edge of the abyss, and that true conservatism which works upon things as they are, to prepare them for what they must be,—­recognizes the necessity of change, to forestall revolution with healthy development,—­and believes that there is no real antagonism between Old and New, but only a factitious one, the result of man’s obstinacy or self-seeking.

[Footnote 1:  London Cotton-Plant, 21st August, 1858.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid. 18th September. 1858.]

[Footnote 3:  It is a coincidence that the recapture of runaways did more than anything else to abolish villanage in England.]

[Footnote 4:  See COBB on Slavery, (Philadelphia:  T. & J.W.  Johnson & Co., 1858,) where these admissions are made. (Introd. pp. 218-220.) This work, written by Mr. Thomas R. R. Cobb, of Georgia, is, considering the natural prepossessions of the author, singularly calm and candid.  We commend it to our readers, as bringing together a great deal of information, and still more as showing the remarkable change which has come over the Southern mind, even among moderate men, on the subject of Slavery.  We shall take a future occasion to notice it more fully.]