18 of goodness. The vices of men finish up a great deal of scavenger-work in the housekeeping of God. Examine any political moment of the past thirty years, when, if there had been a united and indignant North, you think that the career of slavery would have been checked, and you will find nothing out of which to make your supposition. Such a North was an impossibility. Examine the same period of time for the moment when the natural decay of slavery might have commenced, and you will find that the natural growth of slavery forbade that supposition also. When the Republican party triumphed in 1860, its leaders thought that slavery was hemmed in by a permanent change in Northern sentiment, expressed by a majority of votes, and that the time had at last arrived when we should see slavery commencing its decline. This shallow expectation was soon corrected, because it underrated the logical necessities of slavery, and overrated the vitality of republicanism. The triumph of the latter was a moment most dangerous for real democracy, because the North proposed to be content with the election of a president. The danger was that republicanism would have burnt itself out in four years with making a Cabinetpot to boil. Any Secretary of State might keep that fire well fed with old speeches that were once plump with generous abstractions, but served at last only for a crackling of thorns. After the pot had boiled itself dry, and republicanism had shrivelled all up inside and scorched sadly to the bottom, it would have been lifted off the political crane, and a new democratic pot hung in its place, with the South to blow up a fresh fire of cotton-waste and bagasse, and the North to watch and stir the new pottage of compromise for the the homely Esau of liberty. It was a dangerous and almost fatal moment, not only because the North was disposed to be content, but because a large portion of the South was disposed to wait for the reaction in its favor which would have certainly taken place. But slavery is stronger than the South, just as liberty is stronger than the North. And there is always one place where a tendency comes to its focus of white heat which shrivels up reserve, prudential consideration, and all respect: a moment and a place where a domineering passion breaks through every restraint to ravish its object. The focus of slavery was in South Carolina.
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