of the whites the South must rely for its republican permanence, as on their arms it must rely for its force; and here again, the words of Sismondi, written of falling Rome, seem already applicable to the South:  —­“Thus all that class of free cultivators, who more than any other class feel the love of country, who could defend the soil, and who ought to furnish the best soldiers, disappeared almost entirely.  The number of small farmers diminished to such a degree, that a rich man, a man of noble family, had often to travel more than ten leagues before falling in with an equal or a neighbor.”  The destruction of the republican form of government is, then, almost the necessary catastrophe; but what will follow that catastrophe it is not so easy to foretell.  The Republic, thus undermined, will fall; but what shall supply its place?  The tendency of decaying republics is to anarchy; and men take refuge from the terrors of anarchy in despotism.  The South least of all can indulge in anarchy, as it would at once tend to servile insurrection.  They cannot long be torn by civil war, for the same reason.  The ever-present, all-pervading fear of the African must force them into some government, and the stronger the better.  The social divisions of the South, into the rich and educated whites, the poor and ignorant whites, and the servile class, would seem naturally to point to an aristocratic or constitutional-monarchical form of government.  But, in their transition state, difficulties are to be met in all directions; and the well-ordered social distinctions of a constitutional monarchy seem hardly consistent with the time-honored licentious independence and rude equality of Southern society.  The reign of King Cotton, however, conducted under the present policy, must inevitably tend to increase and aggravate all the present social tendencies of the Southern system,—­ all the anti-republican affinities already strongly developed.  It makes deeper the chasm dividing the rich and the poor; it increases vastly the ranks of the uneducated; and, finally, while most unnaturally forcing the increase of the already threatening African infusion, it also tends to make the servile condition more unendurable, and its burdens heavier.

The modern Southern politician is the least far-seeing of all our short-sighted classes of American statesmen.  In the existence of a nation, a generation should be considered but as a year in the life of man, and a century but as a generation of citizens.  Soon or late, in the lives of this generation or of their descendants, in the Union or out of the Union, the servile members of this Confederacy must, under the results of the prolonged dynasty of Cotton, make their election either to purchase their security, like Cuba, by dependence on the strong arm of external force, or they must meet national exigencies, pass through revolutions, and destroy and reconstruct governments, making every movement on the surface of a seething,