without troops, or special commissions, or capital punishments.  It is also true, that these occurrences are, for the most part, directly traceable, not to the celebrated declaration of the equal and inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is the fundamental principle of the constitution; but to the flagrant violation of that principle in the persons of the colored population, of whom those in most of the free states are actually or virtually deprived of political rights; and the rest, constituting a majority of the population in some of the Southern States, are held in abject slavery.  The corruptions and disorders that obscure the bright example of the American people, and detract from the estimation in which their institutions and policy would otherwise be held, generally spring from this source.  So long as slavery and distinction of color exist, America will always be pointed at with the finger of scorn, for her flagrant violation of all truth and consistency.  But let us not forget that this odious institution is the disgraceful legacy of a monarchy—­that it is no necessary effect of republican institutions, but the reverse.  Our quarrel, therefore, is not with the declaration of rights, but that this celebrated declaration should be regarded, in the instance of one class in the community, as a mere rhetorical flourish, and should thus be deprived of its legitimate practical effect.

The great feature of the political arrangements of the free States is, the absence of the aristocratic element.  A pure despotism in the hands of one man has seldom been seen, except in the instances of those renowned military chiefs, whom a retributive Providence has at intervals employed as the scourge of guilty nations.  An aristocracy under various forms and names, has usually been the governing power, and as the too frequent result, laws have been made and administered for the benefit of the few, and not for the many.  Yet the United States of North America exhibit, however, notwithstanding their political theory to the contrary, an aristocracy of the worst kind, an aristocracy of color; in the free States of the many against the few, in affirming these to be a degraded race, as long as African blood runs in their veins; and in the slave States, for a no better reason, reducing them even when they are the majority; to the condition of brute beasts, to be held and sold as goods and chattels.  And this leads me to observe that the writer who mistakes the general government of the confederacy, with its limited scope and powers, for the chief source of laws and administration in the separate States will unavoidably present a confused and distorted representation of existing facts.  Each State constitutes within itself a distinct republic, virtually independent of the general government, so long as its legislation does not conflict with the specific articles of the constitutional compact; all the rights and powers of sovereignty, not specifically delegated to the Government in that instrument, being retained by the States.  Hence nothing can present a wider contrast than the slavery-blackened code of South Carolina, and the statutes of Massachusetts, characterized by republican simplicity and equality.