[62] That very “Uncle Tom,” of whom I have spoken as a stern and terrifying spectacle of grandeur, left his home and went to Philadelphia. [63] Several regiments were enlisted in the beginning of the war, but the plan was changed and they were disbanded. [64] Prince Kropotkin mentioned in his memoirs that the Russian serfs who wanted to show their emancipation did the same thing. CHAPTER VII THE RACE QUESTION[65] I TO any calm observer of the present condition of our country painfully apparent must be the difference between the state of what from long usage we are accustomed to term “the two sections.” We have one blood, one language, one religion, one common end, one government; but the North and the South are still “the two sections,” as they were one hundred years ago, when the bands of the Constitution were hardly cooled from the welding, or as they were in 1860, when they stood, armed to the teeth, facing each other, and the cloud of revolution was hovering above them soon to burst in the dread thunder of civil war. Should one, hearing the phrase “the two sections,” take the map of the American Union and study its salient features, he would declare that “the two sections” were by natural geographical division the East and the West; should he study the commerce of the country with its vast currents and tides, its fields of agriculture and manufacture, he would be impelled to declare that by all the inexorable laws of interest they were the East and the West. And yet, we who stand amid the incontestable evidences of events know that against all laws, against all reason, against all right, there are two sections of this country, and they are not the East and the West, but the South and the rest of the Union. It is proposed to show briefly why this unhappy condition exists; and to suggest a few things which, if earnestly considered and patiently advocated, may, in the providence of God, contribute to the solution of the distressing difficulties which confront us. The divergence of the “two sections” was coeval with the planting of the continent; it preceded the establishment of the nation. It steadily increased until an irrepressible conflict became inevitable; and it was not until after this conflict had spent itself that reconcilement became possible.