Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/43

Rh, State Churches, are left behind for ever. Here was at all events a grand experiment; here was, for the first time, a great community, founded on the free allegiance of all its members to the common good; here was a great hope of Humanity, its newest and probably its fairest hope, though hope is not fulfilment, and though they to whom it is committed are human.

But effort is the law of the world. No hope reaches its fulfilment—no character, whether of man or nation, is formed without a struggle. For the American commonwealth, in its turn, a great trial was prepared.

If New England was, in the language of its founders, emphatically a plantation, not of trade but of religion; Virginia was as emphatically a plantation, not of religion but of trade. It was a plantation of gold-seekers, recruited by convicts. Afterwards there were added a few Cavaliers: but those who wish for Cavaliers should seek them rather in the poor white population of Barbadoes, whither they were exported in great numbers by Cromwell. The aristocracy of the South sprang from a different source. In Virginia and her sister States, partly from the climate, partly and principally from the character of their colonists. Slavery fixed its abode. By a fatal compromise with evil, sure, if God is strong and just, to bring down in the end a full measure of retribution, it was received into the constitution of the new Republic—received by men who had the highest doctrines of liberty and equality on their lips, and had just vindicated their own rights as freemen with the sword. But then it wore the harmless aspect of an aged and sickly man, whose life could not be brought at once to a violent close, but who would soon die in the course of nature. In those days the production of cotton by slave