the shows and gauds of material prosperity, and the insepar able companion of such prosperity in a moneyed aristocracy, there was recognizable, in this slaveholding country, a noble and singularly pure type of civilization. Slavery introduced elements of order and conservatism in the society of the South; and yet, after all, there was no truer democracy in the world than there: the lower white classes recognizing, it is truc, certain distinctions in social intercourse; but outside of these, having a manly sense of equality, and claiming, from the more prosperous orders of society, a consideration and measure of respect that the poor man in the North, where society was made up of browbeating on the one hand, and an insolent assertion of equality on the other, in vain contended for. Slavery trained the white race of the South in habits of command; and though, sometimes, these may have degenerated into cruelty and insolence, yet they were generally the occasions of the revival of the spirit of chivalry in the nineteenth century; of the growth of many noble and generous virtues; and of a knightly polish of manners, that the shopkeeping aristocracy of the North, being unable to emulate, was satisfied to ape in its hotels and caravansaries. Slavery relieved the better classes in the South from many of the demands of physical and manual labor; but although in some instances idle or dissolute lives may have been the consequence of this, yet it afforded opportunity for extraordinary intellectual culture in the South, elevated the standards of scholarship and inental cultivation there, and furnishes some explanation of the extraordinary phenomenon in American history, that the statesmanship of the country was peculiarly, and almost exclusively, the production of the slaveholding States.

The vulgar North envied the South, even down to the small hands and feet of its people. For the better civilization and higher refinement of slaveholders, the North retaliated that the South was dull and unenterprising, and had to import all of its luxuries, and many of its comforts from Yankee shops This was true; but it proved nothing, or it might prove more than the Yankee argument might desire, for with Northern luxuries there came into the South Northern vices. It was said, with a coarse wit, but with not a little meaning, that there were "three things" for which the South would always be depend

ent upon the North, and never could produce for herself; they were "ice, play-actors, and prostitutes." There is a certain. exaggeration in every bon mot; but the witticism is a good one, as it gives an indication of that coarse, vulgar measure of superiority which the North applied to itself to compensate for its defects in refinement, and in the nobler attributes of national life by the side of the South.

With reference to the singular point of contrast between the North and the South in the exhibitions of statesmanship. and political scholarship, we discover the most remarkable feature of American history. Slavery appears, indeed, to have been the school of American statesmanship, for it is from its domains there came by far the most considerable contribution to the political literature of the country. The smallness of Yankee contribution in this respect has been a subject of remark by every impartial historian of America; and there are but few candid persons who will deny that the quality of Yankee statesmanship was always intensely sophomorical. It may have been that slavery afforded to the statesmen of the South certain fields of observation, and applied certain influences of conservatism that qualified them for their peculiar studies; but it is unquestionably true, that to them we must look for the monuments of political literature in America. It has been acutely remarked by a Yankee writer, in the anonymous pages of a magazine, that the public men of the North were generally actuated by an ambition to make a show on what they imagined the theatre of national life; that they neglected the obscure theatres, but noble schools, of State politics; and that to this shallow, ostentatious ambition is to be attributed much of the Yankee distaste for the severity and exclusiveness of the States-rights school.

Contrast between the North and South in material progress.-The times of Andrew Jackson. The tariff controversy.-Calhoun and Webster as representative men. -The latter a sophomore in American politics.-Mr. Webster's private correspondence and poetry.-His superficial accomplishments.-"Nullification," another libel of political nomenclature.-A true explanation and analysis of Mr. Calhoun's scheme to save and perpetuate the Union.-Jefferson Davis' defence of Calhoun. New England's regard for the Union.-The veneration of the Union peculiarly a Southern sentiment.-Mr. Calhoun's Fort Hill speech.-The ignorafice or hypocrisy of Webster and his party.-How the South was driven to "disunion."

THE inequality between the North and the South, with respect to material progress, was perhaps never more marked than at the time of the memorable administration of Andrew Jackson. Referring to this period, a Northern biographer of President Jackson writes in the following style of Yankee

conceit :

"The North was rushing on like a Western high-pressur steamboat, with resin in the furnace and a man on the safety valve. All through Western New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the primeval wilderness was vanishing like a mist, and towns were springing into existence with a rapidity that rendered necessary a new map every month, and spoiled the gazetteers as fast as they were printed. The City of New York began already to feel itself the London of the New World, and to calculate how many years must elapse before it would be the London of the World.

"The South, meanwhile, was depressed and anxious. Cotton was down; tobacco was down; corn, wheat, and pork were down. For several years the chief products of the South had either been inclining downward, or else had risen in price too slowly to make up for the (alleged) increased price of the commodities which the South was compelled to buy. Few new towns changed the Southern map. Charleston languished, or seemed to languish-certainly did not keep pace with New

York, Boston, and Philadelphia. No Cincinnati of the South became the world's talk by the startling rapidity of its growth. No Southern river exhibited at every bend and coyne of vantage a rising village. No Southern mind, distracted with the impossibility of devising suitable names for a thousand new places per annum, fell back in despair upon the map of the Old World, and selected at random any convenient name that presented itself, bestowing upon clusters of log huts such titles as Utica, Rome, Palermo, Naples, Russia, Egypt, Madrid, Paris, Elba, and Berlin. No Southern commissioner, compelled to find names for a hundred streets at once, had seized upon the letters of the alphabet and the figures of arithmetic, and called the avenues A, B, C, and D, and instead of naming his cross streets, numbered them."

The Yankee writer attributes this inequality of conditions to the influence of negro slavery in the South. But it has another interpretation. The tariff measures, which were closely associated with the slavery question-being the commercial appli cation of that doctrine of the power of numerical majorities, taught in the consolidation schools, which had attained its moral and sentimental development in the war upon slaveryhad been used by the North as the stepping-stones to pros perity, and the most profitable expedients of sectional aggrandizement. In 1831 the public debt of the United States was near extinction; and it was calculated that, with the tariff then in force, there would be, in three years thereafter, a surplus in the treasury. The South demanded the repeal of a measure which was no longer necessary for the purposes of public revenue; which had been used to promote the manufacturing and commercial interests of the North; and which, taxing her for the benefit of the Yankees, had restricted and embarrassed her resources, and put upon her the badge of inferiority.

The tariff controversy of 1831-2 introduced on the political stage two of the most remarkable men in America, who more than any others. are to be regarded as the representative men of the North and the South, and the clear-cut anti-types of consolidation and State-rights. They were John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts. The issue between these men was the broadest and most compre

hensive ever made in the political history of the country, involving not only the slavery and tariff questions, but going to the very roots of the constitution, and embracing the whole American system of politics.

Mr. Calhoun was a spiendid type of the accomplished scholar of the South, and a cor.sommate champion of State-rights. He was the opposite of the shallow and rhetorical Massachusetts man in every respect. He was an ascetic in his private habits and taste; he was a devotee of "the midnight lamp;" he was the most exact logician that ever figured in political life; he had no ad captandum arguments for the vulgar; his phrases were almost syllogisms, and his language as clear-cut as the diamond.

If Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, can be described by a phrase, he may be briefly designated as a representative of the smattering of New England education and the rhapsody of "spread eagleism." This may offend the taste of his wor shippers; but of that we are careless, as long as we do not offend the truth of history. To the end of his days, Mr. Webster was nothing more than a ready-spoken sophomore in politics-a man who adorned common-places with silken orations-who had an unrivalled "Fourth-of-July" style of public speaking-but who never invented or discovered any thing in politics, and who defended his doctrines much more with frothy' sentiments than with sound arguments. There is nothing so injurious to posthumous reputation as the publication of "private correspondence," where the great man is discovered in undress; and the officious friends of Mr. Webster, who published two octavo volumes of his letters, after his death, have exhibited the intellectual hero of Massachusetts as a vapid, sophomorical, shallow statesman, who could not afford to wear his literary court-dress-a tinsel one at that-but on state occasions. Mr. Webster had the weakness of putting scraps of law Latin in his correspondence; and it is doubtful whether his attainments in the dead languages extended beyond this cheap collection from his professional glossary. In his early days he affected a taste for poetry, and wrote tawdry and conceited verses to his friends. In one instance-as a specimen of his muse, some years after his admission to the bar-we are given this bit of the Yankee pastoral: