Now the contest between these opposing principles is that which is raging in our country this day.  Of course, any broad territorial representation of this must be of a very mixed quality.  Our best civilizations are badly mottled with stains of barbarism.  In no state or city can egotism, either of the hot-blooded or cold-blooded kind,—­and the latter is far the more virulent,—­be far to seek.  On the other hand, no social system, thank God, can quite reverse the better instincts of humanity; and it may be freely granted that even American slavery shades off, here and there, into quite tender modifications.  Yet not in all the world could there possibly be found an antagonism so deep and intense as exists here.  The Old World seems to have thrown upon the shores of the New its utmost extremes, its Oriental barbarisms and its orients and auroras of hope and belief; so that here coexist what Asia was three thousand years ago, and what Europe may be one thousand years hence.  Let us consider the actual status.

In certain localities of Southern Africa there is a remarkable fly, the Tsetse fly.  In the ordinary course of satisfying its hunger, this insect punctures the skin of a horse, and the animal dies in consequence.  A fly makes a lunch, and a horse’s life pays the price of the meal.  This has ever seemed to me to represent the beast-of-prey principle in Nature more vigorously than any other fact.  But in that system whose fangs are now red with the blood of our brave there is an expression of this principle not less enormous.  It is the very Tsetse fly of civilization.  That a small minority of Southern men may make money without earning it,—­that a few thousand individuals may monopolize the cotton-market of the world,—­what a suppression and destruction of intelligence it perpetrates I what consuming of spiritual possibilities! what mental wreck and waste!  Whites, too, suffer equally with blacks.  Less oppressed, they are perhaps even more demoralized.  No parallel example does the earth exhibit of the sacrifice of transcendent values for pitiful ends.

In attempting to destroy free government and rational socialization in America, this system is treading no new road, it is only proceeding on the old.  Its central law is that of destroying any value, however great, for the sake of any gratification, however small.  Accustomed to battening on the hopes of humanity,—­accustomed to taking stock in human degradation, and declaring dividends upon enforced ignorance and crime,—­existing only while every canon of the common law is annulled, and every precept of morals and civilization set at nought,—­could it be expected to pause just when, or rather just because, it had apparently found the richest possible prey?  Could it be expected to withhold its fang for no other reason than that its fang was allured by a more opulent artery than ever before?  The simple truth is—­and he knows nothing about this controversy who fails to perceive such truth—­that the system whose hands are now armed against us has always borne these arms in its heart; that the fang which is now bared has hitherto been only concealed, not wanting; that the tree which is to-day in bloody blossom is the same tree it ever was, and carried these blossoms in its sap long ere spreading them upon its boughs.