republicanism. In the largest sense, I hold this also to be the effect of the one just mentioned; for, if tested, the whole spirit and tone of Christianity are republican. On New England soil, from the hour when the little band of pilgrim heroes first set foot on an inhospitable shore, by their footprints upon it making a barren rock a holy shrine for the world's love and veneration, has ever been a sure refuge, a very palladium of republican institutions, of human liberties. It was not alone its religious tendencies that excited the persecution and detestation of Puritanism in the Old World which gave impulse to the resolution to transplant themselves to a land where freedom, if nothing else, was to be found. It was equally as much its republican and democratic theories. Souls made free by the spirit of the Lord, as the souls of those grand old Puritans were, could no more brook the tyranny of the Charleses and Georges of Britain, and so, through blood and fire and sword and chains, was the germ of liberty borne across the watery waste, to be sown anew, as they thought and proposed, in the genial soil of the region bordering on the Hudson, but, as God willed it, in the perverse and barren soil of rockbound, sea-washed New England. Truly this was a novel spectacle. Never in the history of peoples before was it seen that a bare idea was strong enough to lay the foundations of a great state, through persecution, exile, and death, and untold privations worse than death. O you who would bring discredit on the memory and name of the Puritans, recall this noblest era of time; rise for one hour, if your souls have any wings, to the height of this grandeur, and bid calumny and defamation be dumb!

This germ of republican freedom took deep root, and acquired an ineradicable hold of their civil polity, and the whole machinery of their civil government; and, spreading from New England to the adjoining colonies, and from these to others, soon permeated the whole confederation, at length forming the basis of a national government, a national condition which has heretofore represented the highest civilization of the world.

Is it not plain, then, why they do so, who oppose and hate the influence and ideas of New England? If anything could measure the utter vileness of slavery and its degrading effect on the mind, it would be the consideration of the unblushing assurance with which its lovers defend it, and at the same time assail those sacred principles which lie at the root of our national life, and without which we are dead and cumbering the ground. Our nation holds in trust certain principles, for the successful carrying out of which the nations of the earth wait in hushed and anguished expectancy, and in the failure of which we should be no better than any of the effete, defunct peoples of buried ages; or, rather, in the failure to bring them to a triumphant vindication, we had far better be as Sodom and Gomorrah. These principles are now the stake for which the loyal men of the land are gladly offering up life, treasure, children, all, so they but win.

We hear a great deal, nowadays, from rebel sources, of the different race which settled Virginia and Carolina from that which peopled New England, and the immeasurable superiority of the former. If the mouthpiece of the confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis, may be believed, the latter and their descendants are not worthy even to be the slaves of the former, and are a degree lower in the scale of creation than the hyenas! Differing in language, manners, customs, ideas, there is no possibility of a peaceable union, say the confederate organs. In fine, language is exhausted of epithets expressive of their scorn, contempt, and hatred of the Yankees, as they are opprobriously nicknamed. But do these men ignore the fact that the original settlers of both New England and Virginia were purely English? They were from the same stock precisely. As to the character of each, I cannot do better than to quote from a work of which Americans may well be both glad and proud, a work that has set us and our institutions in a truer and juster light than any before it. I allude to the work of M. De Tocqueville on 'Democracy in America.' In volume first, chapter fifth, he says:

He adds, in a note:

It is true that in the course of time some men of high character and position were attracted to the genial climate and virgin resources of the new Southern colonies, and, buying up large tracts of land, fixed themselves permanently, sensibly modifying the condition of affairs. The descendants of such men as these afterward became the most famous leaders of the Revolution which Puritan principles effected. They were men of whom descendants may well be proud, but it is certain that they have had very few descendants; therefore, the great body of the slaveholders, each one of whom would fain believe himself, and try to make others believe him, a scion of this renowned stock, must have had a very different origin.

In striking contrast with the above account, here is what he says of the first settlers of the Northern colonies:

Let the world judge between the Puritan and the so-called Cavalier!

As the same author remarks—'The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and the social condition of the Southern States;' so it is no less true, that the influence of an almost unlimited democracy, the product of widespread intelligence and pure religion, united to the English character, explains the peculiar civilization of New England. It is nothing strange, certainly, that, after the wide and continued divergence of two aggressive principles for more than two hundred years, they should at last come to stand in the position of giant antagonisms, and close in a deadly grapple for the ascendency. It is perfectly natural that the ignorance and mental darkness of slave