250 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



and densely populated East must needs have an outlet for its aggres- 

 sive enterprise, its rapidly accumulating wealth, and its growing popula- 

 tion. The dense forests and fertile plains of the magnificent and 

 inviting West were transformed into rich and powerful States. Lines 

 of immigration and enterprise, of wealth and of general development, 

 were pushed forward with marvellous rapidity and success to the shores 

 of the Pacific. Along these lines were transplanted from the East the 

 prejudices and animosities engendered for a half-century. The South, 

 traversed by no transcontinental line of communication, sullen and 

 humiliated in her great and crushing losses, and by defeat in war, most 

 naturally nursed the sectional animosities and prejudices of the past. 



Their fields were devastated, their homes desolate, their household 

 goods destroyed ; without money, without food, without implements 

 with which to work ; their credit gone, their labor utterly destroyed, 

 their industrial systems wiped out, the accumulated wealth of genera- 

 tions swept away as by a breath ; in the shadow of drear desolation and 

 the blackened ruins of once happy homes, they were left friendless and 

 unaided, to depend on those qualities of true manhood which are 

 always evolved by terrible emergencies. Theirs was the noble and 

 heroic task to remove the ghastly wreck which marked the feast of war- 

 gods, who had revelled in their high carnival of blood, of carnage, and 

 of death. 



What an inviting condition was thus presented for wicked sectional 

 agitators, and how assiduously they utilized it, let the shameful sec- 

 tionalism of the past quarter of a century, with its baneful fruits, tell. 

 Whatever may be said of chattel slavery, with all its acknowledged 

 evils, history nowhere records that it ever made a millionnaire. What- 

 , ever may have been its effect upon our society and civilization, it pro- 

 duced no tramps. But we have developed another system of slavery, 

 the slavery of honest labor, a slavery of sweat, and brawn, and 

 I brain, a slavery more terrible and degrading in its effects than the 

 I African ever knew, and the legitimate outgrowth of which has 

 cursed our country with an army of three millions of tramps, and has 

 placed the greater part of the wealth of this great nation in the hands 

 of one two-thousandth part of its population. It has made the eight 

 millions of American farmers once the proud possessors of the most 

 princely heritage that God ever gave to man virtually a nation of 

 tenants, whose every possession, and whose every day of toil and labor, is 

 forced to pay tribute to exacting, domineering, legalized monopoly. In 

 all the discriminating partisan legislation which has disgraced the annals 

 of the nation for the last quarter of a century, and in all the machinations 



