It was disgraceful, and yet it would not stop. The North had by this time become so full of Abolitionism, that even the Democrats were not to be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Alabama explained this. “When I was a boy in the Northern States,” he said, “Abolitionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But now this band of Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands—the Black Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squatter-sovereignty men—all representing the common sentiment that Slavery is wrong.” And when Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a minority of the people, upon a platform which declared that the Constitution was to be disregarded, the party of conservatism and tradition resorted to _force_ to maintain its rights. And what happened then? Why, simply this: a group of fanatical visionaries who had for thirty years been jeered at for demanding of the country something that was revolutionary and inconceivable—the destruction of an institution which had stood for centuries, and was built into the very framework of the nation—suddenly began to see the mighty structure totter, to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before they had fairly time to realise what was happening, the whole heaven-defying colossus lay a heap of dust and ruins at their feet! I have said that I believe that our country is now only a few years away from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent movement of protest, slowly making headway and ultimately permeating the whole thought of the country. What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead’s “Cotton Kingdom.” Slave labour was a very wasteful means of cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Virginia was once a great exporting state, but in the forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the Far South began to prove insufficient, there was another move, into Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas—which brought on the clash with the free states. At the present day we have a society, industrial instead of agricultural; and the struggle which we are witnessing is that between capital and labour. It is a struggle, not for land, but for profits; and if we are to show that it is, like the Civil War, “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,” we must show in this case also that the thing struggled for is limited in quantity, and ultimately insufficient to satisfy the needs of both the contending parties.