The Irrepressible Conflict and Impending Crisis [pp. 531-551]

AND IMPENDING CRISIS.
533
ernment into ruin-which shall perish, and " like some unsubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wreck behind"-a change
which none but the great conservative statesman of the South
appeared to comprehend, or to be able to grapple with, and
effectually to arrest which, how earnestly, how eloquently, he
plead with the North-how solemnly he warned the South, his
beloved South, whom he only loved ihe more as her dangers
and difficulties increased, and whose supineness and divisions
at last broke his mighty heart. Being forewarned, she was not
forearined, and though blessed with institutions and resources
that might have stood against the world in arms, " with her
fate trembling in the scales," there are none to-day "so poor
to do her reverence." Why is this? Letus inquire. In the
human mind there is a riveted conviction, while " present evils
are supportable, to fly not to those we know not of," and to
become and to feel the more willing an(l submissive, if we
believe the wrongs and sufferings of others are mlore grievous
and painful than our own; and then if, in addition to this, be
added a sense of d- ty on the part of those who suffer, or imagine they suffer less; to aid those who suffer, or they imagine
suffer, more than themselves, and they can, or think they can,
aid them, we have not only elicited the sympathy but the
active working sympathy of the one class for the other, intensified, quickened, and goaded into action, by the galling sense
of the wrongs and sufferings of the sympathizing class. Just
as we behold it to-day manifested by the deluded and mistaken
white laboring classes of the North, in behalf of their fellowbeings constituting the African laboring class of the South.
We find this truth illustrated in France, just after our revolutionary struggle. Whether the French people found their
wrongs insupportable or not, the conflict between capital and
labor resulted in civil commotions which overthrew the established government of the Bourbons and resulted in civil war,
when the laboring class, operated upon and influenced by the
same mistaken feelings that influence the laboring class of the
North to interfere in favor of the Africans of the South, were
impelled to interfere in favor of the Africans of San Domilfgo.
In that island they destroyed the system of African slavery,
when, as Mr. Everett has stated in his late Union speech at
Boston, crimes so daring and atrocious were perpetrated that
their names and descriptions were veiled in the Latin tongue;
and, as in France, the people found leaders prepared to sanetion such crimes, so there are leaders found in the North prepared, not only to sanction, but are urging their followers to