It is not to disorganize society; it is not to overturn religion, or resort to Nihilism, that the tendency of the workingman’s mind leans. It is your presumption, arrogance, and overwhelming self-esteem that has offended him. A baby’s finger may touch the spring holding the bar by which is caged the lion. The lion once uncaged, and a hundred men cannot restrain its freedom. A little stream of water, flowing over the top of a dam, might have been stopped by a handful of mud in the hands of a child; increasing, the stream weakens the barrier; the dam has gone, the flood has come. There’s a little stream of truth trickling over the dam that holds back the flood of the resentment of the people; silently, softly, with an appearance of “apathy,” it began to move, until the rich received the first spray, notifying them of its approach, November the 8th, 1892. CHAPTER X. THE CAUSE OF BULLETS, ’61; BALLOTS, ’92.--ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN ’60. Of political parties in America, De Tocqueville declared that “Aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the United States.” That greatest conflict of American history, the military and political struggle between the forces of slavery and the forces of human freedom, was no less a conflict between aristocracy and democracy. In the South, which President-elect Cleveland only the other day termed--with undoubted historical accuracy--the cradle of American liberty, there had been developed a social and political aristocracy as distinct and powerful as almost any the world has seen. To this development, which did not become marked until after the early part of the present century, many causes contributed. The industry of the South had become centralized in the hands of large land owners who cultivated extensive plantations with slave labor. The tremendous growth of slavery exerted a depressing effect upon the manufacturing spirit; the artisan, the mechanic, and the trader came to be regarded as socially inferior. The planting of rice, sugar cane, and especially cotton, which was found to be the most profitable business, was also the most esteemed; and the South became an almost purely agricultural section. Lorin Blodget lays it down as an accepted rule that “the country wholly devoted to agriculture necessarily tends to aristocratic despotism, or some form of enslavement of the masses;” and he quotes similar expressions from Adam Smith, Buckle, and other recognized authorities on political economy.