Massachusetts and Virginia were respectively the head-quarters and embodiments of this conflict, this struggling of ideas, these tendencies to return to the past or to advance into the future, and it is as remarkable, perhaps, to find the former arrayed on the side of power and privilege, as that the descendants of the cavaliers should now be the champions of democracy, and the advocates of the broadest liberty. But, as has been observed, our ideas are the results of accident, our opinions originate in the circumstances that surround us, and therefore while the mental habits of the North were only slightly modified from those of the mother country, those of the South, under wholly different conditions—conditions, in fact, utterly unknown to the English mind—were radically different. The Northern masses, as has been remarked, were then ignorant and helpless, and the agricultural class, though advanced considerably beyond the same class in England, as the tillers of the soil had then barely escaped from the old feudal slavery or serfdom, were utterly powerless and without defenders in the great civil contest that succeeded the revolution. As against the advocates of strong government—those who represented the governing class—they could make no resistance whatever, except a physical and revolutionary one. The right of suffrage was very limited, and, indeed, as in England at this time, property and not population was the basis of representation, and therefore the vast majority had no voice nor representation whatever. Under such circumstances, it is obvious and beyond question that if a similar state of things had existed at the South, a government would have been formed on the British model—a republic, doubtless, but a bastard one—with powers so extensive and absolute that, as we now witness in Europe, nothing but revolution and physical force could ever enable the masses to overthrow it or to regain their natural liberty.