If I have said nothing of the grievances which the South has alleged against the North—­its tariff, made chiefly in the interest of the north-eastern manufacturing States, or its inconsiderable but enthusiastic Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Abolition party—­it is because I do not believe these causes of complaint would have had the same effect upon any but a community of slaveholders, men made impatient (by the life-long habit of despotism), not only of all control, but of any opposition.  Thirty years ago Andrew Jackson—­a man of keen sagacity as well as determined energy—­wrote of them that they were bent upon destroying the Union, and that, whatever was the pretext of their discontent, that was their aim and purpose.  ‘To-day,’ he wrote, ’it is the tariff, by and by it will be slavery.’  The event has proved how true a prophet he was.  My own conviction is that the national character produced and fostered by slaveholding is incompatible with free institutions, and that the Southern aristocracy, thanks to the pernicious influences by which they are surrounded, are unfit to be members of a Christian republic.  It is slavery that has made the Southerners rebels to their government, traitors to their country, and the originators of the bloodiest civil war that ever disgraced humanity and civilisation.  It is for their sinful complicity in slavery, and their shameful abandonment of all their duties as citizens, that the Northerners are paying in the blood of their men, the tears of their women, and the treasure which they have till now held more precious than their birthright.  They must now not merely impose a wise restriction upon slavery, they must be prepared to extinguish it.  They neglected and despised the task of moderating its conditions and checking its growth; they must now suddenly, in the midst of unparalleled difficulties and dangers, be ready to deal summarily with its entire existence.  They have loved the pursuit of personal prosperity and pleasure more than their country; and now they must spend life and living to reconquer their great inheritance, and win back at the sword’s point what Heaven had forbidden them to lose.  Nor are we, here in England, without part in this tremendous sin and sorrow; we have persisted in feeding our looms, and the huge wealth they coin, with the produce of slavery.  In vain our vast Indian territory has solicited the advantage of becoming our free cotton plantation; neither our manufacturers nor our government would venture, would wait, would spend or lose, for that purpose; the slave-grown harvest was ready, was abundant, was cheap—­and now the thousand arms of our great national industry are folded in deplorable inactivity; the countless hands that wrought from morn till night the wealth that was a world’s wonder are stretched unwillingly to beg their bread; and England has never seen a sadder sight than the enforced idleness of her poor operatives, or a nobler one than their patient and heroic endurance.