might New England have to-day:  yet, for all that, the civil strife would have been inevitable, because both in Greece and America this strife evidently arises out of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all, exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical social revolution.  Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as a peculiar institution, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity, must come into conflict with the totally opposite institutions of democracy, and that not because it is merely or nominally slavery, but because it is a political organ modifying the entire structure of government.  Slavery, as it existed in Athens, slavery, as it existed formerly in the Northern States, was in everything, except its name and accidents, consistent with democracy; and, in either case, to dispense with the institution was to introduce no radical change, but only to do away with the name and accidents.[A]

[Footnote A:  Here, however, the reader must understand that the infernal system of slave-stealing is left entirely out of the account.]

In Sparta, or in the South, the case was far otherwise.  Here, slavery existed in its strict severity; it came into being in connection with material conditions,—­that is, in connection with a soil especially favorable to agriculture,—­and it maintained its existence by reason of its fitness, its indispensableness, to certain social conditions; it could not, therefore, be changed or annulled without running counter both to the inveterate tendencies of Nature and the still more inveterate tendencies of habit.  This difference between the two estates of slavery is evident also from the fact, that, while, in the one case, the law would admit of no emancipation, in the other, the emancipation was effected legally, either in the lump, as in New England, or by instalments, as in Athens; and in the latter State we must remember that the process was rendered the more easy and natural by the fact that the slaves were, in the first instance, generally prisoners taken in war, and not unfrequently stood upon the same social level, before their capture, with their captors, while in Sparta the slaves were taken as a subject race, and held as inferiors.

Much glory has been given to Lacedaemon on the score of her martial merits.  To ourselves this glory seems rather her shame, since these merits are inseparable from her grand political mistake.  We might as justly exalt Feudalism on the ground of its military establishment, which, after all, we must admit to be an absolute necessity in the system.  To the Spartan oligarchy it was equally necessary that the whole State should exist perpetually under martial law.  In the first place, it was necessary, if