laborers are manufactured.  There was not much chivalry in the basis of Southern power, but most grand revolutions are brought about by acting on the lives of the masses, who are more easily moved by appeals to their sense of immediate interest than by reference to the probable consequences of a certain kind of political action.  Our party-men know this, and hence it is, that, while they have not much to say about the excellence of slavery, they ask the Irish to oppose the overthrow of that institution, on the ground, that, if it were to cease to exist, all the negroes of the South would come to the North, and work for a dime a day,—­which nonsense there are some persons so ignorant as to believe.

To return to 1762:  the people of the Colonies were as martially disposed as are the people of the States in these days.  “In the heat of the Old French War,” says Mr. Hawthorne, speaking of the inhabitants of New England, “they might be termed a martial people.  Every man was a soldier, or the father or brother of a soldier; and the whole land literally echoed with the roll of the drum, either beating up for recruits among the towns and villages, or striking the march toward the frontier.  Besides the provincial troops, there were twenty-three British regiments in the northern colonies.  The country has never known a period of such excitement and warlike life, except during the Revolution,—­perhaps scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and this a stirring and eventful one.”  There has not been so much movement in the Secession War as characterized that in which our ancestors were engaged a century ago, and which was fought in America and in India, in Germany and in Portugal, in Italy and in Africa, in France and in Bohemia.  As the great Lisbon earthquake had been felt on the shores of Ontario, so had the war which began the year of that earthquake’s occurrence shaken the world that lay on the American lakes.  Forty years ago, old men talked as much of the Old French War—­the Seven Years’ War of European historians—­as of the War of the Revolution.  It was a contest but for the happening of which there could have been no American Revolution, at least none of the character that now occupies so high a place in history.  Or, had it happened, and had the event been different, our annals would have been made to read differently, and the Fourth of July could never have become an institution.  It opened well for the French, and, had not fortune changed, the colonists, instead of looking to Paris for aid, only a dozen years after its conclusion, might have been ruled by proconsuls sent from that “centre of civilization,” as it delights to call itself.  And even if the terms of the treaty which put an end to that war had been a little differently arranged, England might have triumphed in the war that she carried on against our ancestors.  Both the war itself, and the manner of concluding it, were necessary to the creation of that American empire which, according to Earl Russell, we are fighting to maintain,—­as unquestionably we are, though not in the ignoble sense in which the noble Earl meant that his words should be taken and understood.