Russia yet maintains slavery, and is a despotism.  Most of the other European states have abolished slavery, and adopted the system of free labor.  It was the antagonistic political tendencies of the two systems which the first Napoleon was contemplating when he predicted that Europe would ultimately be either all Cossack or all republican.  Never did human sagacity utter a more pregnant truth.  The two systems are at once perceived to be incongruous.  But they are more than incongruous—­they are incompatible.  They never have permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.  It would be easy to demonstrate this impossibility, from the irreconcilable contrast between their great principles and characteristics.  But the experience of mankind has conclusively established it.  Slavery, as I have already intimated, existed in every state in Europe.  Free labor has supplanted it everywhere except in Russia and Turkey.  State necessities developed in modern times are now obliging even those two nations to encourage and employ free labor; and already, despotic as they are, we find them engaged in abolishing slavery.  In the United States, slavery came into collision with free labor at the close of the last century, and fell before it in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, but triumphed over it effectually, and excluded it for a period yet undetermined, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.  Indeed, so incompatible are the two systems, that every new State which is organized within our ever-extending domain makes its first political act a choice of the one and the exclusion of the other, even at the cost of civil war, if necessary.  The slave States, without law, at the last national election, successfully forbade, within their own limits, even the casting of votes for a candidate for President of the United States supposed to be favorable to the establishment of the free-labor system in new States.

Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by side within the American Union.  This has happened because the Union is a confederation of States.  But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation.  Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation.  Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results.