I see no reason, however, to modify my language.  It is too often the case that men of the loftiest ideals seek to attain them by the most objectionable means, and the maxim Fiat justitia ruat coelum cannot be literally applied to great affairs.  The conversion of the Mahomedan world to Christianity would be a nobler work than even the emancipation of the negro, but the missionary who began with reviling the faithful, and then proceeded to threaten them with fire and the sword unless they changed their creed, would justly be called a fanatic.  Yet the abolitionists did worse than this, for they incited the negroes to insurrection.  Nor do I think that the question is affected by the fact that many of the abolitionists were upright, earnest, and devout.  A good man is not necessarily a wise man, and I remember that Samuel Johnson and John Wesley supported King George against the American colonists.)

Unfortunately, something more than mere political rancour was at work.  The areas of slave and of free labour were divided by an artificial frontier.  “Mason and Dixon’s line,” originally fixed as the boundary between Pennsylvania on the north and Virginia and Maryland on the south, cut the territory of the United States into two distinct sections; and, little by little, these two sections, geographically as well as politically severed, had resolved themselves into what might almost be termed two distinct nations.

Many circumstances tended to increase the cleavage.  The South was purely agricultural; the most prosperous part of the North was purely industrial.  In the South, the great planters formed a landed aristocracy; the claims of birth were ungrudgingly admitted; class barriers were, to a certain extent, a recognised part of the social system, and the sons of the old houses were accepted as the natural leaders of the people.  In the North, on the contrary, the only aristocracy was that of wealth; and even wealth, apart from merit, had no hold on the respect of the community.  The distinctions of caste were slight in the extreme.  The descendants of the Puritans, of those English country gentlemen who had preferred to ride with Cromwell rather than with Rupert, to pray with Baxter rather than with Laud, made no parade of their ancestry; and among the extreme Republicans existed an innate but decided aversion to the recognition of social grades.  Moreover, divergent interests demanded different fiscal treatment.  The cotton and tobacco of the South, monopolising the markets of the world, asked for free trade.  The manufacturers of New England, struggling against foreign competition, were strong protectionists, and they were powerful enough to enforce their will in the shape of an oppressive tariff.  Thus the planters of Virginia paid high prices in order that mills might flourish in Connecticut; and the sovereign States of the South, to their own detriment, were compelled to contribute to the abundance of the wealthier North.  The interests of labour