If slave society, therefore, thus necessarily diverges ever farther and
farther from the conditions which characterize, and those which result
from the operations of free institutions, such society must of course be
fast on its way to a monarchical, or even an absolute and despotic
government. The whites of the South even now may be considered as
separated into two distinct classes--the governing and the governed. The
slaveholders are virtually the governing class, through their superior
wealth, education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as
virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount,
leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging
every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any
movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything
must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into
which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter
bombardment awoke it just in time to see its awful peril and strike out,
with God's help, into the free waters once more.
* * * * *
From these considerations, can we be surprised at the rumors that now
and then come from the South, of incipient movements toward a
monarchical government? Not at all. Should the rebellion succeed--a
supposition which is, of course, not to be harbored for a moment--but in
such an improbable contingency there can be hardly a reasonable doubt
that a monarchy would be the result.
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