[Footnote 22: If a nation must have monarchy, I have no hesitation in saying that it should not be isolated. It should be "buttressed by establishments." If we must have Kings, it would be better that the Lords and Commons should follow. Kings, Lords, and Commons are perhaps the nearest approach which the monarchical form of government can make towards liberty. When there is no intermediate power between the king and the people, every dispute between the parties, for want of a conciliatory compromise, brings the nation at once to blows; and the immediate issue is necessarily either a despotism established, or a dynasty overthrown. The chances against a perfect balance are infinite. But in our country we can never have a regular nobility. Antiquity is absolutely necessary to such an establishment. Bonaparte tried the experiment of a suddenly created nobility, and it entirely failed; although his nobles were much more talented and efficient than the ancient noblesse. Bonaparte's nobles besides were the most unprincipled, and the most remorselessly rapacious of modern Europe; and this perhaps is the almost necessary character of an upstart nobility.] This would certainly be the result in the non-slaveholding states, where the agrarian spirit, co-operating {280} with executive usurpation, would inevitably overthrow the balance of the government, and lead on eventually to military despotism. But such is my confidence in the influence of slavery on the slaveholder--so certain am I, judging from all fair reasoning on the subject, and from the past history of the world, that the spirit of liberty and of equality, glows with the most unqualified intensity in the bosoms of the masters of slaves, that I believe the slaveholding states, with all the horrors of disunion against them, would nevertheless, under the impulse of this spirit, so ineradicable among _them_, be enabled to preserve their liberties, and arrest their governments in their dangerous proclivity towards monarchy. It is true, circumstances might often even here concentrate too much power in the executive department; but the owners of slaves, with a spirit like that of the Barons at Runnimede, would embrace the first opportunity to take back the power that had slipt from their hands; and the absence of any thing like a formidable agrarian party, would deprive the executive of that infallible resource to which, under other circumstances, it might resort, to obtain the power necessary to break through the trammels of constitutions, and finally to entrench itself safely behind military power. Where has a greater love for liberty been shown, or a more noble struggle made for its preservation than in Poland? And in our own country, it is a matter of history, that in no portion of it has the spirit of freedom so fervently developed itself as in the Southern States, nor has any portion been found more constantly and effectually battling against power.