would have swept the whole of this capital away.  Compensation, the remedy applied by England to Jamaica and South Africa, was hardly to be thought of.  Instead of twenty millions sterling, it would have cost four hundred millions.  It was doubtful, too, if compensation would have staved off the ruin of the planters.  The labour of the free negro, naturally indolent and improvident, was well known to be most inefficient as compared with that of the slave.  For some years, to say the least, after emancipation it would have been impossible to work the plantations except at a heavy loss.  Moreover, abolition, in the judgment of all who knew him, meant ruin to the negro.  Under the system of the plantations, honesty and morality were being gradually instilled into the coloured race.  But these virtues had as yet made little progress; the Christianity of the slaves was but skin-deep; and if all restraint were removed, if the old ties were broken, and the influence of the planter and his family should cease to operate, it was only too probable that the four millions of Africans would relapse into the barbaric vices of their original condition.  The hideous massacres which had followed emancipation in San Domingo had not yet been forgotten.  It is little wonder, then, that the majority shrank before a problem involving such tremendous consequences.

A party, however, conspicuous both in New England and the West, had taken abolition for its watchword.  Small in numbers, but vehement in denunciation, its voice was heard throughout the Union.  Zeal for universal liberty rose superior to the Constitution.  That instrument was repudiated as an iniquitous document.  The sovereign rights of the individual States were indignantly denied.  Slavery was denounced as the sum of all villainies, the slave-holder as the worst of tyrants; and no concealment was made of the intention, should political power be secured, of compelling the South to set the negroes free.  In the autumn of 1860 came the Presidential election.  Hitherto, of the two great political parties, the Democrats had long ruled the councils of the nation, and nearly the whole South was Democratic.  The South, as regards population, was numerically inferior to the North; but the Democratic party had more than held its own at the ballot-boxes, for the reason that it had many adherents in the North.  So long as the Southern and Northern Democrats held together, they far outnumbered the Republicans.  In 1860, however, the two sections of the Democratic party split asunder.  The Republicans, favoured by the schism, carried their own candidate, and Abraham Lincoln became President.  South Carolina at once seceded and the Confederacy was soon afterwards established.