Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/9

Rh visions of a Brotherhood of Man filled the minds of enthusiasts on the eve of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the Anti-Slavery sentiment was called forth at the North as strongly as the Pro-Slavery sentiment at the South. And the immediate result of the victory has been the downfall of Slavery, not in the United States only, but everywhere and for ever.

The theory that the war arose from a divergence of commercial interest, that it was a struggle between free trade producers on one side and protectionist manufacturers on the other, though skilfully devised for the market of English opinion, was defective in two respects. It did not fit the facts, and the cause it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect. It did not fit the facts; for the Western States were producers as well as the Southern, and the Western States, notwithstanding the predictions of their imminent secession, were as true as the New England States to the Union, and as staunch for the war. The cause which it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect, for when did a mere divergence of commercial interest rend political bonds so powerful, or lead to such a civil war? It is too true that the manufacturers and ironmasters of the North are still in the gall of Protection, that they still resist those economical laws of Providence in the observance of which other nations are blessed, and that for them now, as formerly for our protectionists, writers are found to veil barbarous cupidity in the language of patriotism and science. The same tendency is seen in our colonies, and ignorance is its chief root. Perhaps this quarrel between manufacturer and producer may have contributed to the disruption as a secondary cause, but it was as a secondary