This period of forty years may be regarded as that of the _consolidation of the people_. The first thirty years of it was the era of their _industrial and social consolidation_; the last ten years has been the period of their _political union against the Slave Power_. An aristocracy always exhibits the uttermost pitch of human policy in its career, and amazes and outwits society by its marvellous display of executive ability. But the people are always moved by great supernatural forces that are beyond their comprehension, often disowned or scorned by them, but which mould their destiny and lead them to a victory spite of themselves. The people always grow without conscious plan or method, and rarely know their own strength. But there are always a few great men who represent their destiny, and, often against their will, direct them in the path to liberty. History will record the names of three great men who, during the last forty years, have been the most notable figures in this consolidation of the people in this republic; three men that the implacable hatred of the Slave Power has singled out from all other Northern men as special objects of infamy; men who represent the industrial, moral, and political phases of the people's growth to supremacy. Each came when he was wanted, and faithfully did his work; and their history is the chronicle of this advance of liberty in the republic. The first of these men was De Witt Clinton, of New York. No Northern man so early discovered the deep game of the Slave Power as he. He was the ablest statesman of the North in the days when the aristocracy of the South was just effecting its consolidation. He was a prominent candidate for the Presidency, and was scornfully put down by the power that ruled at Richmond. The slaveholders knew him for their clear-headed enemy, and drove him out of the arena of national politics. Never was political defeat so auspicious. Cured of the political ambition of his youth, Mr. Clinton turned the energies of his massive genius to the _industrial consolidation of the North_. He saw that all future political triumph of liberty must rest on the triumph of free labor. He anticipated the coming greatness of the Northwest, and boldly devoted his life to the inauguration of that system of internal improvements which has made the Northern States the mighty, free industrial empire it now is. Within the period of ten years lying nearest 1820, the people, under the lead of Clinton and his associates, had brought into active operation the three great agencies of free labor--the steamer, the canal, the railroad; while our manufacturing industry dates from the same period.