This is the glorious, towering, expanding structure, which the insane rebellion, the dark slave power, is raging to destroy! to tear it, branch by branch, to pieces, and scatter the ruins to the four winds, in order to set up, what? in its place. A foul, decaying object--a slave oligarchy, which, do what it will, is, at each decennial census, seen to fall steadily farther and farther into the rear even of the most laggard of the Free States, in all that goes to make up our American civilization.[1] And all this because it sees that the life of the republic is the death of slavery, and free labor the eternal enemy of slave. This difference in the conditions of labor, then, forms the third point of antagonism between free and slave institutions. It is an antagonism that is ever on the increase--ever intensifying, and utterly irremediable in any conceivable way or mode. Much as the nation longs for peace, this is utterly hopeless, let it do what it will--compromise, try arbitration, mediation--nothing can bring lasting peace but the death of slavery. Freedom may be crushed for a season, but as it is the breath of God himself, it will live and struggle on from year to year, and from age to age, and give the world no rest until it has vanquished all opposition, and asserted its divine right to be supreme. If slave society, therefore, thus necessarily diverges ever farther and farther from the conditions which characterize, and those which result from the operations of free institutions, such society must of course be fast on its way to a monarchical, or even an absolute and despotic government. The whites of the South even now may be considered as separated into two distinct classes--the governing and the governed. The slaveholders are virtually the governing class, through their superior wealth, education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount, leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter bombardment awoke it just in time to see its awful peril and strike out, with God's help, into the free waters once more. * * * * *