secretly, earnestly, and with wide conference and mutual connivance, to separate the South from the North.  We are to distinguish between the pretenses and means, and the real causes of this war.  To inflame and unite the great middle class of the South, who had no interest in separation and no business with war, they alleged grievances that never existed, and employed arguments which they, better than all other men, knew to be specious and false.

Slavery itself was cared for only as an instrument of power or of excitement.  They had unalterably fixed their eye upon empire, and all was good which would secure that, and bad which hindered it.  Thus, the ruling class of the South—­an aristocracy as intense, proud, and inflexible as ever existed—­not limited either by customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secret, disowning its own existence, baptized with ostentatious names of democracy, obsequious to the people for the sake of governing them; this nameless, lurking aristocracy, that ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, that produced nothing, but lay coiled in the body, feeding on its nutriment, and holding the whole structure to be but a servant set up to nourish it—­this aristocracy of the plantation, with firm and deliberate resolve, brought on the war, that they might cut the land in two, and, clearing themselves from an incorrigibly free society, set up a sterner, statelier empire, where slaves worked that gentlemen might live at ease.  Nor can there be any doubt that though, at first, they meant to erect the form of republican government, this was but a device, a step necessary to the securing of that power by which they should be able to change the whole economy of society.  That they never dreamed of such a war, we may well believe.  That they would have accepted it, though twice as bloody, if only thus they could rule, none can doubt that knows the temper of these worst men of modern society.  But they miscalculated.  They understood the people of the South; but they were totally incapable of understanding the character of the great working classes of the loyal States.  That industry, which is the foundation of independence, and so of equity, they stigmatized as stupid drudgery, or as mean avarice.  That general intelligence and independence of thought which schools for the common people and newspapers breed, they reviled as the incitement of unsettled zeal, running easily into fanaticism.  They more thoroughly misunderstood the profound sentiment of loyality, the deep love of country, which pervaded the common people.  If those who knew them best had never suspected the depth and power of that love of country which threw it into an agony of grief when the flag was here humbled, how should they conceive of it who were wholly disjoined from them in sympathy?  The whole land rose up, you remember, when the flag