mind could see the necessity for slavery. The questionWhat will become of the South without slavery? seemed unanswerable.

There came a time too when slavery assumed the proportions, the solidity, the naturalness, the essentiality of an institution. No man could remember the South without slavery; few men could conceive of the South without slavery. With all its perils, its cares, its unprofitableness, -for it was not equally profitable throughout the Southits political strength, its sources of weakness to the South, after weighing it in every aspect under which it appeared to the slaveholder, slavery was an essential element to a form of industrial life such as prevailed at the South: it meant food and clothing and comfort and ease and pleasure, yes, life itself to the Southerner. To propose to strip the North of its domestic animals, freeing the oxen from the plow and the horses from the wagon, would have been resented at the North even with less resentment than to propose to interfere with slavery at the South; and to deprive the northern man of the instruments by which he might make a living and thus sink him into misery and death would be a no more startling proposition than to deprive the South of its slaves or to attempt to limit the extension of slavery.

Behind the Southerner's defense of slavery was his understanding of the struggle for existence. Climate contributed to intensify his conviction that the perpetuity of slavery meant, essentially, the continuity of life itself. It follows from these convictions that the South left no measure untried to keep the slave a slave. Just as the farmer at the North cared for his team of horses, the planter at the South cared for his negroes. Each cared for his property so as to get the greatest amount of work out of it without serious injury to the property itself.

This absorption of the thought of a people in guarding and protecting slavery made the South homogeneous and at the same time isolated it; nor did it complain of the isolation. Down to the time of the enactment of the

Kansas-Nebraska Bill, nearly four and one-half millions of immigrants arrived in the United States from Europe. Of these a million and a third were British; a million and a fifth were Germans; nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand were Irish; there were thirty-four thousand Scotch and a hundred and eighty thousand French, and two hundred thousand came from England alone. Whither did they go? The new States on free soil received the greater part of them, and the remainder paused to find homes here and there in the older free States. Scarcely an immigrant went to the South. The exception was New Orleans; thither there was at times a large migration of French but this migration had no such effect on the far South as did the coming of these millions of Europeans into the North. Foreign immigration explains, largely, the early and rapid gain of the North over the South in population. The foreigner came to America to gain a living and to make a home: neither was easily done at the South. There labor was slave labor, and slavery compelled the South to discourage the coming of free labor. Moreover, no free man would put himself on the plane of the slave. Thus all through the half century before the outbreak of the Civil War the South was depriving herself of fresh industrial stock and was accustoming herself to despise free labor. To work was the normal condition of society at the North; to work was the fate of slaves at the South. And the immigrants from Europe who helped to lay the foundations of Indiana and Illinois, of Michigan and Wisconsin, of Iowa and Minnesota, hated slavery and taught their children to hate it. At the South, if an Englishman or a Scotchman became a resident, he willingly fell in with the thought and customs of the South; in his devotion and defense of slavery he not infrequently out-southerned the Southerner, just as at the North the Irishman and the Englishman and the Scotchman, who took up lands in the new Territory or the new State out-northerned the Northerner in his hatred of slavery. And the South clearly recognizing the preponderance which

foreign immigration was giving to the North reciprocated the hatred of the immigrant at the North. Indeed evidence is not wanting which shows that Southern statesmen at times attributed hostility to slavery at the North chiefly to its foreign-born population. Long before the outbreak of the Civil War the South was an American community of almost pure English stock, its great planters living in almost barbaric splendor and its entire industrial system resting on the shoulders of the slave. More and more as the years passed the tendency of life at the North was toward individualism, a varied industry, a ceaseless, restless activity; and more and more the tendency of life at the South was toward independence, homogeneity, uniformity, isolation. Gradually, yet rapidly, the inhabitants of the slave States knew less and less about the North; Southerners rarely travelled in the North and the vast body of poor whites at the South heard of the North only by rumors and traditions. Probably at the time of the Dred Scott decision there were not a hundred thousand people of the South who knew the North by even travelling through portions of it. And the North was almost equally ignorant of the South. Intercourse between the sections had quite ceased at the time of Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860. Yet despite this isolation few attached significance to it; the very nearness of the impending conflict seemed to darken men's vision.

That the people of the South were conscientious in their opinion of slavery cannot be doubted, and it was their conscientiousness which made slavery the chief peril to the American people. The South had reached that state of mind in which they could not see the world without slavery, nor conceive of their own existence without slaves. By the decision in the case of Dred Scott it would seem that the South had won at every point; it had demanded all for slavery and had at last received it from the supreme judicial tribunal of the land. To interfere with slavery was now, therefore, to violate the supreme law; the Constitution was