contrast to the usual estimation of the courage and daring of the people of the South. But the usual estimation is true only of the people who have a concert of interest in slavery, and who, whatever their petty disagreements may be, concur in their politics. Nowhere, therefore, is democracy less actual than in the rebellious States; a ruling and a subservient class exists precisely as in England or Austria. To increase the latter, comprising the people I first described, is by no means to increase the power and extend the domination of the other, but the contrary; and undoubtedly the diminution of their number by the sacrifice of their lives in the rebellion, is considered by the chief managers as desirable, in view of the success of their scheme of polity and government. Accordingly, in enforcing their plan of formally identifying the various States with secession--the form being the ordinance of secession--the suffrages and sense of this ruled class were ruthlessly unheeded, and denied validity. Hence we say that several of the rebel States did not 'secede,' it being true that a majority of the people expressed their aversion to rebellion--this majority being, for the occasion, the ruling one, in virtue of the principle to which _all_ equally deferred. But it is the _will_ of the ruling or aristocratic class in all similar cases, and not the forms of law or principle, which accomplishes such changes, whether according to the forms of law or in disregard of them. _This class are never respecters of principle_, but rule in virtue not of what principles empower them to do, as a majority, but of the power of might and dominant strength. It is obvious that were they to do the former, they would be destitute of any other power than pertained to the whole community, they in part, and others equally. Accordingly, they having, once for all, in their adhesion to the Constitution, and again on its eve, consented to an election, and therefore its issue, when a majority of the entire nation elected a representative of the Chicago declaration, they reverted to their power of might, and rebelled. It is, therefore, the subversion of an _un_principled (the term is of the strictest accuracy) ruling class, or aristocracy, and the obliteration of their peculiar power, that we have to accomplish. This power consists wholly of certain peculiar interests as masters. To deprive them of these, is the only possible terminus of the question at issue. So plain and palpable is the whole question, that we need hardly say that their whole scheme of government turns upon and clusters about this interest. For the preservation of this interest, which they thought touched by the advances of freedom, they rushed into war, and for the conservation of their power, they base all upon it.