Our rare political organization is but the coarse, bold
outlines--the rugged trunk and branches of the great tree of liberty.
Out of this will grow the delicate and luxuriant foliage of a varied,
beautiful, scientific, and dignified industry and social life.
This is the glorious, towering, expanding structure, which the insane
rebellion, the dark slave power, is raging to destroy! to tear it,
branch by branch, to pieces, and scatter the ruins to the four winds, in
order to set up, what? in its place. A foul, decaying object--a slave
oligarchy, which, do what it will, is, at each decennial census, seen to
fall steadily farther and farther into the rear even of the most laggard
of the Free States, in all that goes to make up our American
civilization.[1] And all this because it sees that the life of the
republic is the death of slavery, and free labor the eternal enemy of
slave.
This difference in the conditions of labor, then, forms the third point
of antagonism between free and slave institutions.
It is an antagonism that is ever on the increase--ever intensifying, and
utterly irremediable in any conceivable way or mode. Much as the nation
longs for peace, this is utterly hopeless, let it do what it
will--compromise, try arbitration, mediation--nothing can bring lasting
peace but the death of slavery. Freedom may be crushed for a season, but
as it is the breath of God himself, it will live and struggle on from
year to year, and from age to age, and give the world no rest until it
has vanquished all opposition, and asserted its divine right to be
supreme.
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