indivisible, while those of the “non-slaveholder,” if engaged in production, are similar, and as to all others, when they do not involve the government, though the pursuits or interests be widely different, there can be no social conflict. The ideas of Jefferson, Madison, and their cotemporaries were naturally formed by these circumstances, and after the revolutionary contest was over and a common government was to be created, they naturally proposed a system in harmony with the condition they represented. The North, as has been said, with no social substratum or natural distinctions, desired a government based on artificial distinctions, those separating classes, the same substantially as in England, though, of course, dispensing with a titled class, a king, and laws of primogeniture. It is true all the States had a few negroes, and they were all in their normal condition of so-called slavery, but their numbers were so inconsiderable that they did not influence society or modify the mental habits of the Northern people. All over, and especially in the New England States, the same ideas were reflected by the representative men; they wanted a government based on the _status quo_, on wealth, that should keep power in the hands of the few who then exercised it, and with sufficient force to hold the multitude in subjection. They proposed an executive for life, who should also appoint the governors of the States, that senators should serve ten years, and various other projects of similar character—all ending in or embodying the same common idea, that is, a government for the few at the expense of the many. The Southern men, on the contrary, proposed a government embodying _their_ idea—the idea of democracy, and that should reflect the advanced opinion and living spirit of their own society, rather than a thing based on the model of Britishism, and involving substantially the principles of the old European order. While they duly appreciated education, cultivation, and other accidental social distinctions, those whose ideas were advanced by juxtaposition with negroes, or with this natural line of demarcation, would not listen to the creation of a central government that tended in any respect to place power in the hands of a class, or that enabled the few, however indirectly it might be, to govern the many. The contest, both in the convention and before the people, assumed the form of a contest for a strong or a weak government—a government that should be supreme, like the British Parliament, or a government of delegated powers, which, while carefully defined, should be extremely limited in its functions or scope of action. But back of all this were the fundamental ideas—the British and the American—the spirit of the old societies and the spirit of the new order—of British oligarchy and of American democracy.