"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples--compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder. In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi--the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage--these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war. And it must not be forgotten, too, that Calhoun, for the South, accepted the slavery issue as the gage of battle, though he knew for what purpose it was manufactured. Unity of the South against Northern aggression was what he was fighting for; and, having failed to present a solid front against the tariff because Clay's ambition and Louisiana's influence disintegrated his forces in the Southwest, he was the more easily betrayed into adopting a temporary expedient--the policy of shifting the issue from its high ground. In this way, too, he got "hay and stubble" in his foundation, and gave the enemies of civil liberty among the whites a chance to pose as the friends of civil liberty among the blacks. * * * * *