America must be educated and free, if they were to compete with the free
working people of Great Britain and Europe. Contrariwise, the South
believed that manual labour was a task for slaves, that cotton, rice
and sugar were produced more rapidly by slave labour than by free
labour. The Southern civilization was built on the plan of producing raw
cotton, and exchanging it for manufactured goods. It did not escape the
notice of Southern leaders, however, that under free labour the North
had nearly double the population and wealth of the South. But Senator
Hayne explained this by saying that the biggest nations had never been
the greatest, and that the renowned peoples had been like Athens,--small
states, elect and patrician.

But darkness and light, summer and winter, liberty and slavery cannot
exist side by side, in peace and tranquility. Unite hydrogen and
chlorine, and the chemist has an explosion that takes off the roof of
the house. And because liberty and slavery were antagonistic, and
mutually destructive, whenever the representatives of both came together
there was inevitably an explosion either on the platform or through the
press. It could not have been otherwise. In Palestine two opposing
civilizations came into collision,--one the Hebrew and the other the
Philistine,--and the Philistine went down. In Holland the Dutchmen,
working towards democracy, collided with the Spaniards, working towards
autocracy, and the Spaniard went down. In England, Hampden and Pym came
into collision with Charles the First and Archbishop Laud. The two
leaders of democracy wished to increase the privileges of the common
people by diffusing property, liberty, office and honours, while Charles
the First and Laud wished to lessen the powers of the people, and to
increase the privileges of the throne; democracy won, and autocracy
lost. And now in this republic, a civilization based upon the freedom
and education of the working classes came into collision with the