The writer of these papers anticipated
and predicted for a long time, and has not yet fully ceased to
anticipate, that the present conflict may gradually shape itself into a
desperate and universal struggle, North and South, between these two
principles, in their bald, undisguised, and unmitigated hostility; that,
in other words, as a party of freedom should be developed at the South,
there would be developed _pari passu_ at the North a great reactionary
party; assimilating the elements of a _bogus_ democracy and all those
who by organization or position are inherently and overweeningly
aristocratic; a party bold, powerful, and desperate enough to bring home
the civil war to our own doors; in other words, that the war would
become a war wholly of Ideas; and those defined down to their sharpest
and most ultimate differences of logical significance. In that case, the
events of the French Revolution would have been, or will be, repeated in
America, on a more gigantic scale. Warning symptoms have already
appeared among us of the possibilities of all this. If it be in the good
providence of God that we are to escape this terrible ordeal--if it be
permitted that this cup of national evils pass from us--it can only be
that we are a step farther on in the completion of our education, as a
nation, than was obviously revealed to the investigation of the
observer; that, as a people, we are nearer to a genial and willing
acceptance of truth and obedience to the dictates of justice than
appeared.
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