is felt forty years later in his account of it. The profound political instinct which led. him to take the walk is as noticeable as the religious nature of his impulse. It is wonderful to reflect how little the significance of the act could have been understood by any casual observer of the scene. Here is a man who turns down one street rather than another, upon meeting an acquaintance. He looks like a gentleman doing an act of politeness; while he is, in fact, a saint going through the fire for his faith, and a hero saving the republic. So banal are externals, so deep is reality. But our present interest in the incident lies in this,- that it measures the separation of Massachusetts from the ordinary standards of Europe. Frederick Douglass was almost a man of genius and he looked like a man of genius. His photograph at the time of his escape from slavery might be the photograph of a musician or a painter. He was the kind of man who, in a Paris or London salon, would excite anyone's passing notice, as perhaps a South American diplomat or artist.

An intelligent foreign observer might have told Bowditch that the sufferings which both Bowditch and Douglass were enduring betrayed the fact that a social

revolution was under way. They were the sign of an approaching homogeneity. This universal disturbance, this universal throe is the first thing that all the people of the United States ever experienced together. Their former unions had been political and external: this was spiritual and internal.

We are familiar with the Northern form of the uneasiness, because the Northerner could speak. He cried out; and through his utterance came the cure. But of the pain of the Southerner, to whom all expression of feeling was denied, we know nothing. With the rise of Abolition, perished every vestige of free speech at the South. Events now converged to crush the manhood out of the slave-holding classes. A Southerner could not be gentle, unselfish, quick to speak his thought, or genuinely interested in anything. His opinions were prepared for him before he was born; and they were lightkilling illusions, the precursors of mania. The enactment of very stringent and inhuman slave codes, and the prohibition of all education to the slaves followed in the wake of the Abolition outbreaks. The maturing of a sort of philosophy of slavery, according to which slavery was seen as the cor

nerstone of religion and progress, was the work of the following decade, and the task of Calhoun. The corollaries to this philosophy which involved an abandonment of popular education, and the cutting off of the South from every intellectual contact with the civilization of Europe, were duly worked out during the next thirty years. By the time the war came there existed a sort of Religion of Slavedom. The Pro-slavery Northern Democrats of Buchanan's time held opinions which would have shocked the most pronounced slaveholders of 1820.

During all this time Virginia and the Carolinas, which constituted the Holyland of the Slave Dispensation,- endured a silent exodus and migration on the part of the more liberal spirits. Men even went to New Orleans to escape the tyranny of slave opinion at Charleston. Thus were the souls of Americans squeezed and their tempers made acid. A slightly too ready responsiveness to stimulus of any kind came to be the mark of the American, whether at the North or at the South; the difference being that the too ready response at the South was apt to be an insult, at the North an apology.

This hair trigger nervousness on the part of everybody was the result of poison in the

system. What could the manly Southern youth do? Leave all and follow Abolition? He knew of Abolition only that it was a villainous attack on his father's character and property. He was in the grip of a relentless, moving hurricane of distorted views, false feelings, erroneous philosophy; and he knew nothing clearly, understood nothing clearly, until he perished upon the battlefields of the Civil War, fighting like a hero.

It is impossible in describing the course of the Slave Power between 1832-65 to avoid harsh language. If ever wickedness came upward in the counsels of men, it did so here. Yet there are elements in all these matters which elude our analysis. The virtues glimmer and seem to go out; but they are never really extinguished. How much idealism, how much latent heroism must have existed in the South during all these years before the war, was seen when the war came. Villains do not choose for themselves Commanders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is lost, that old society, and it died almost speechless,― died justly and inevitably. Yet we do well to remember with what a flame of sacrifice it perished, to remember with what force, what devotion, what heroism, Humanity

showed herself to be still adorned in that hour of an all-devouring atonement.

The great fever came to an end with Appomattox. The delirium stopped: the plague had been expelled. The nation was not dead: the nation was at the beginning of a long convalescence. It is, however, about the earlier symptoms of the disorder that I would speak here, about the presentiments of headache and nausea, and about that dreadfullest moment in all sickness (as it seems to me), the moment when we admit that something serious is coming on.

The struggle between the North and the South began over free speech about the negro, and especially about the right of benevolent people at the North to extend their benevolence to the negro, as, for instance, in their schools, Sunday-schools, hospitals, etc. Now the South sincerely believed that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had morally bound the North not to talk about slavery in private conversation, and not to treat the negro as a human being. The South had succeeded in imposing this conviction upon the whole North.

"The patriotism of all classes," wrote Edward Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, in a message to his Legislature, "the patri