In no other contest of history are those elements in human affairs on which tragic dramatists are prone to dwell so clearly marked as in the American Civil War.  No unsophisticated person now, except in ignorance as to the cause of the war, can hesitate as to which side enlists his sympathy, or can regard the victory of the North otherwise than as the costly and imperfect triumph of the right.  But the wrong side—­emphatically wrong—­is not lacking in dignity or human worth; the long-drawn agony of the struggle is not purely horrible to contemplate; there is nothing that in this case makes us reluctant to acknowledge the merits of the men who took arms in the evil cause.  The experience as to the relations between superior and inferior races, which is now at the command of every intelligent Englishman, forbids us to think that the inferiority of the negro justified slavery, but it also forbids us to fancy that men to whom the relation of owner to slave had become natural must themselves have been altogether degraded.  The men upon the Southern side who can claim any special admiration were simple soldiers who had no share in causing the war; among the political leaders whom they served, there was none who stands out now as a very interesting personality, and their chosen chief is an unattractive figure; but we are not to think of these authors of the war as a gang of hardened, unscrupulous, corrupted men.  As a class they were reputable, public-spirited, and religious men; they served their cause with devotion and were not wholly to blame that they chose it so ill.  The responsibility for the actual secession does not rest in an especial degree on any individual leader.  Secession began rather with the spontaneous movement of the whole community of South Carolina, and in the States which followed leading politicians expressed rather than inspired the general will.  The guilt which any of us can venture to attribute for this action of a whole deluded society must rest on men like Calhoun, who in a previous generation, while opinion in the South was still to some extent unformed, stifled all thought of reform and gave the semblance of moral and intellectual justification to a system only susceptible of a historical excuse.

The South was neither base nor senseless, but it was wrong.  To some minds it may not seem to follow that it was well to resist it by war, and indeed at the time, as often happens, people took up arms with greater searchings of heart upon the right side than upon the wrong.  If the slave States had been suffered to depart in peace they would have set up a new and peculiar political society, more truly held together than the original Union by a single avowed principle; a nation dedicated to the inequality of men.  It is not really possible to think of the free national life which they could thus have initiated as a thing to be respected and preserved.  Nor is it true that their choice for themselves of this