were not less conflicting.  The competition between free and forced labour, side by side on the same continent, was bound in itself, sooner or later, to breed dissension; and if it had not yet reached an acute stage, it had at least created a certain degree of bitter feeling.  But more than all—­and the fact must be borne in mind if the character of the Civil War is to be fully appreciated—­the natural ties which should have linked together the States on either side of Mason and Dixon’s line had weakened to a mere mechanical bond.  The intercourse between North and South, social or commercial, was hardly more than that which exists between two foreign nations.  The two sections knew but little of each other, and that little was not the good points but the bad.

For more than fifty years after the election of the first President, while as yet the crust of European tradition overlaid the young shoots of democracy, the supremacy, social and political, of the great landowners of the South had been practically undisputed.  But when the young Republic began to take its place amongst the nations, men found that the wealth and talents which led it forward belonged as much to the busy cities of New England as to the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas; and with the growing sentiment in favour of universal equality began the revolt against the dominion of a caste.  Those who had carved out their own fortunes by sheer hard work and ability questioned the superiority of men whose positions were no guarantee of personal capacity, and whose wealth was not of their own making.  Those who had borne the heat and burden of the day deemed themselves the equals and more than equals of those who had loitered in the shade; and, esteeming men for their own worth and not for that of some forgotten ancestor, they had come to despise those who toiled not neither did they spin.  Tenaciously the Southerners clung to the supremacy they had inherited from a bygone age.  The contempt of the Northerner was repaid in kind.  In the political arena the struggle was fierce and keen.  Mutual hatred, fanned by unscrupulous agitators, increased in bitterness; and, hindering reconciliation, rose the fatal barrier of slavery.

It is true that, prior to 1860, the abolitionists were not numerous in the North; and it is equally true that by many of the best men in the South the institution which had been bequeathed to them was thoroughly detested.  Looking back over the years which have elapsed since the slaves were freed, the errors of the two factions are sufficiently manifest.  If, on the one hand, the abolitionist, denouncing sternly, in season and out of season, the existence of slavery on the free soil of America, was unjust and worse to the slave-owner, who, to say the least, was in no way responsible for the inhuman and shortsighted policy of a former generation; on the other hand the high-principled Southerner, although in his heart deploring the condition of the negro, and sometimes imitating