But this did not suit the designs of Providence. It was His purpose that there should be here those manifold social and political conflicts which are the life of a great nation--which are, indeed, the motive power to the wheels of human progress. A great problem in human destiny was here to be wrought out; a powerful nation was to arise, bearing within itself the elements of its own continual purification. The Cavalier landed upon the shores of Virginia, and spread his settlements southward. The influence of climate upon both the physical and mental constitution of man is well known. The enervating climate of the 'sunny South,' the soil fruitful beyond a parallel, pouring forth its products almost spontaneously, and, above all, the 'peculiar institution,' which released the planter from the necessity of toil, all tended to aggravate the peculiarities of mind and body which the settlers inherited from their ancestors; and the result has been a race which, while it presents here and there an example of brilliant, meteoric genius, is, in the main, both intellectually and physically inferior to the hardy denizens of the North and West. The same influences have fostered the aristocratic notions of the early settlers of the Southern States. With every element of a monarchy in their midst, the Gulf States have long been anything but a republic. De Bow, when, a few years since, he broached in his Review the idea, and prophesied the establishment of a monarch in our midst, was but giving expression to a feeling which had long been dominant in the Southern heart. All their institutions, associations, and reminiscences have tended steadily to this result, and in the event of the success of the rebellion, it needs but some bold apostle to take upon himself the propagation and execution of the plan, to make the idea a startling reality. And herein lies the secret of the sympathy of the English aristocracy with the confederates in their struggle for independent existence.