The issue was again to be joined between constitutional freedom and the odious despotism of an enthroned mob. On the one side were asserted the principles of regulated liberty, without which free government can never be stable--order, allegiance, and reverence for law and authority. On the other, the wild passions of an infuriated populace, hurling down the restraints of law, shattering constitutions; and when its frenzied lust had been satiated by the destruction of every accessible image of virtue and order, transferring supreme power from its polluted grasp to the hands of demagogues--capable agents of the depraved will which invests them with authority. Such was really a faithful contrast of the two powers which were now inaugurated in what had been the United States. It was still the old Greek question of the "few or the many," the "King Numbers" of the North against the conservatism of the South. The old contest was to be revived, of Cleon and Nicias, in the Athenian Agora, and struggling on through the political battle-fields of free governments in all ages. It is not an abuse of language to characterize the North as realizing the _ultra_ theory of popular government. Its political fabric rests exclusively upon the Utopian conception of an intelligence and integrity in the masses which they have never been known to possess. Carrying out its pernicious construction of the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are born free and equal," it professes to hold in light esteem the obvious distinctions of race, property, and color. Earnestly devoted to the successful illustration of the experiment of Democracy, it has sedulously directed its social and political development to the overthrow of caste, the obliteration of necessary social distinctions, and the practical assertion of the principle of absolute social, political, and personal equality among all men. The election of Lincoln was the grand, decisive triumph of these tendencies. He went into power as the avowed champion of the interests of the poor and laboring classes, which he declared to be in conflict with those of the slave-holding aristocrats of the South. Entirely undistinguished, with no political record, his popularity was based upon his vulgar antecedents--no slight recommendation to the populace, gratified at the prospective promotion of one of its own class.