contest it was a strange weapon glittering in strong hands.  Our society, diluted and weakened by the Southern element, revolted at first from the creed that is to prove its salvation.  Not alone in our border States had the dragon crept, searing our fair institutions with his hot breath, but even upon the sturdy old Puritan stock were engrafted many of the petty notions that pass for ‘principles’ in Dixie.  True, we were educated, all of us, into a sort of decent regard for the good old element of labor,—­we call it industry,—­more antique, since antiquity is a virtue, than aristocracy, for it began in Paradise.  But this was a feature of our Northern character that was to be hurried out of sight, ignominiously buried without candle or bell, when the giant of Southern chivalry stalked across our borders.  The bravado and gentlemanly ruffianism of youthful F.F.V-ism at college, and the supercilious condescension of incipient Southern belledom in the seminary, impressed young North America with a respect that was indeed unacknowledged, but that grew with its growth and strengthened with its strength.  But this mock romance of ancestry, this arrogant assumption by the South of all the social virtues and courtesies of which the nation, or indeed the universe, could boast, was like the flash of an expiring candle to Lyon.  He had little to do with first families North or South; his mission was to the people.  His practical mind gathered in, sheaf after sheaf, a whole harvest of political facts.  He saw that the government of the United States, originally intended to be administered by the people, had been for years in the power of the minority.  Against this perversion of the purpose of the founders of the republic, this outrage to the memory of men who labored for its defense and welfare, he entered his earnest protest.  The shallow effort of the Democratic party to establish upon constitutional grounds the monstrous phantom of justice they called government, was met by his hearty indignation.  He says, ’With the artfulness of a deity and the presumption of a fiend, our own Constitution is perversely claimed by the Democracy as the aegis for the establishment of a slave autocracy over our country.’

No element more fatal to our growth or freedom could Lyon conceive than this slave autocracy.  It sapped the very foundations of republicanism, and, stealthily advancing to the extreme limits of the law, enjoyed the confidence of the people, while it plotted their subjugation.  All the varied machinery of the new social system, falsely styled government, had for its object the extinction of individual rights and the deification of capital.  Church and state united in the unholy effort to Crush the masses, and intriguing politicians, by dint of dazzling rhetoric and plausible promises, lured the people on to secure their own downfall at the polls.  The only remedy for this Lyon saw in the elevation of the masses.  ’It is the greatest political revolution yet