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The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour of his hands is necessarily vulgar been recognized with so terrible a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public and private intercourse.
These were, as we learn elsewhere, the letters in which some of the Kansas pro-slavery leaders repeated their declaration of the hopelessness of any further contest to make Kansas a slave-State. Why this secret suppression by Secretary Cobb? There is but one plausible explanation of this whole chain of contradictions.
"What do you think this Commonwealth will develop into, under Chmidd and Hozhet and Khouzhik and the rest?" Lanze Degbrend asked, to keep the lecture going. "Oh, a slave-state, of course; look who's running it, and whom it will govern. Not the kind of a slave-state we can do anything about," he hastened to add.
"If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it, if she wants a free-State constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted up or down." The whole affair looked to him "like a system of trickery and jugglery to defeat the fair expression of the will of the people."
There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour. By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of antiquity.
Language could go no farther in vehemence of protest and denunciation than the words of some of the slave-state men in the House and Senate. Besides this, Garrett Davis of Kentucky made a very effective argument when he said: "There is not a rebel in all Secessia whose heart will not leap when he hears that the Senate of the United States is originating such a policy.
A real middle class in our sense of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere of their activity and to keep aloof from public life.
To the public at large, the central point of interest in this special message, however, was the following dogmatic announcement by the President: "It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judicial tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave-State as Georgia or South Carolina.
Has Massachusetts ever mobbed an envoy or brutally assaulted a Senator of South Carolina? Has any Northern State ever nullified an article of the Federal Constitution, as every seaboard Slave-State has always done in respect to the colored citizens of the North? When a man's allowing himself to be kicked comes to be reckoned an outrage on the kicker, then Mr.
Nothing could more forcibly demonstrate the unequal character of the contest between the slave-State and the free-State men in Kansas, even in these manoeuvres and conflicts of civil war, than the companion exploit to this third Lawrence raid.
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