THE words at the head of this article have exercised the public mind in the United States without any definite ascertainment of what they meant, at least for the unreflecting multitude. Has there ever been in a specific sense a "Southern question"? What was it? What is it? What will it continue to be? What will be its duration? What was its origin? What will be its solution? What is its present importance, whether it be still alive with its primitive vigor or turning into the yellow leaf of decay? What were and what are its effects and influences in a national point of view, assuming the complete and undisputed existence of our nationality to be established, after having been also a question for so long a time in which was involved, deeply laid within it, the other one, the Southern question; for they became the major and the minor of a syllogism, with a conclusion ever to be remembered on this continent. These are the points which I intend to glance over in a necessarily short article, short when compared to the magnitude of the subject, to which full justice cannot be done without the development of considerations of political, civil, and social economy which would embrace a diversity of matters extending over too large an area.

The Southern question germinated on the first day when a slave was introduced into the thirteen North American colonies of Great Britain. It would have been the Northern or the Western question if slavery had been established in a remunerative form, and had taken such roots and such proportions as to have become a social, financial, and political institution in those sections, instead of the Southern part of the country. More than the artificial barrier between the Puritan and the Cavalier, more than the climate, more than the peculiarities of the productions of the soil, more than the antagonism of commercial or other interests, it made the South distinct from the North and West. The masters being whites, and the slaves blacks, there necessarily sprang up a domineering and proscriptive aristocracy in all its relations with the inferior class,

free or not, which belonged to the African race, whether their skin retained its original ebony color, or whether through several mongrel generations it had so approached the ivory complexion as to protect those who possessed it from detection by an inexperienced eye. But, although an implacable aristocracy in one sense, it was in another the broadest social democracy; for all the whites, poor or rich, ignorant or educated, were on a footing of equality. The proudest planter with a princely estate would hardly have ventured, at least in Louisiana, on refusing to seat at his table the humble pedler who stopped to sell his wares, and claimed his hospitality; if he employed a white mechanic, that mechanic ate with his own refined and delicately bred family. No Caucasian was ever sent to the kitchen, for that would have assimilated him to the black race, and put him on a level with slaves. The position, if attempted to be given, would not have been accepted, it would have been a forfeiture of caste, and would have been resented as an insult. There was a nobility in the white skin more sacred and more respected than the one derived from the letterspatent of kings. Thus the slavery of the blacks constituted a white aristocracy, and the equality resulting from the possession of that privileged complexion made of that aristocracy a democracy. It was a singular compound which had never existed before, and which made of the Southern people a peculiar one, difficult to be understood. It was the realization of the Janus face with its two different and antagonistic physiognomies; it was the typical double-headed eagle, but with only one big heart glowing with pride and defiance. It was a superiority of social position, and that superiority was resented with ill-dissembled impatience in those States where it did not prevail.

The writer of this article remembers a French nobleman saying to him after a sojourn of several months in Louisiana: "With you alone the feudal age still exists. With us it is a thing of the past. There are in Europe dukes and marquises, it is true. But what does it signify? It is an empty bawble, a vain title. What is a marquis without a marquisate? You Southern planters, you are high barons in reality, although not in name. You have vassals over whom you reign with absolute sway. Therefore you have all the virtues, qualities, defects, and vices of an aristocracy. Hence you are the born rulers of your country, because you have

from the cradle the instinct of command, and you inherit from generation to generation that intellectual and physical organization, that knowledge of human nature, that captivating refinement of tastes, that confiding geniality of manners, that innate self-possession and self-confidence which characterize you, with a natural tendency, besides, to those studies and pursuits which are productive of a race of statesmen, such, for instance, as are to be found in England. Therefore, as long as you retain your peculiar institution, you will remain what you are, and, although numerically in the minority, you will control the destinies of the Union." The sagacious Frenchman was not the only one who arrived at these conclusions. There was in them a logic which gave rise to the true "Southern question." The causes which procured for one section of the country a predominance over the rest were to be destroyed, cost what may. It became the most ruthless of all questions, the question of power. It lay in a nutshell, but that shell was destined to explode with the force of a pent volcano. It soon swelled into a political Vesuvius, and showered upon the broad face of our country that irresistible lava of destruction, which has removed all landmarks, and perhaps will be found in the future to have changed the sectional aristocracy and sectional democracy, which operated as salutary checks and counter-checks upon one another, into a concentrated national despotism, that will run its predestined course.

At the North and West, the existence of the condition of things I have described not being found, there was a political democracy of whites, as with us at the South, but within that democracy there was a social aristocracy that did not recognize within its exclusive precincts the equality of the white skin. At the South the "white trash" claimed and enjoyed social equality with the wealthy, an equality which sometimes asserted itself, not only in the courts of law, but also in the courts of honor, the jurisdiction of which was seldom declined by the parties interested, and there was no exception taken on the ground of rank and education. The "white trash" had its pride of birth, based on its Caucasian origin, which enabled it to look down on the inferiority of a much lower class. At the North and West the poor whites - I will not say the "white trash," the expression not being in use there - were compelled to bow to a more favored class, superior to them

by the accident of wealth, and with whom they could claim no social equality by virtue of a nobility of complexion. The cobbler would not have ventured to sit at dinner with the millionnaire at whose country mansion he had sought hospitality. Thus, at the South there was a democracy within an aristocracy, and at the North an aristocracy within a democracy. But the two aristocracies and the two democracies were very different. The aristocrats of the South were real ones. They were, or entitled to become, the masters of men. The aristocrats of the North were spurious; they assumed to be what they were not and could not be, from the very nature of the circumstances in which they were placed. They were wealthy merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, manufacturers, speculators, brokers, bankers, but they were not barons after the fashion of the South, to use the expression of the Frenchman whose language I have quoted. It was evidently impossible that commonwealths so antagonistic in their fundamental organization should form a confederacy, without there being an incessant struggle for a reciprocal modification of their status. Hence the prediction of an "irrepressible conflict" which fell from the lips of a celebrated American statesman. In the South the population was divided into two parts, the whites, who, rich or poor, ignorant or educated, constituted the privileged class, the Caucasian nobility, like the Magyar element of Hungary; then, the blacks who were slaves, and who, proud of their daily intercourse with the superior, the godlike race in their eyes, and exulting in a sort of goodnatured familiarity in which they were indulged, were conscious at the same time of the importance which they derived from the social position of their masters, and enjoyed a protection and an exemption from the anxieties of life which made them look down upon the free negro, of pure or mixed blood, with a sense of great superiority. It was with contempt and derision that these were called "free niggers" by those who remained in servitude. The free colored man was the Pariah of the Southern commonwealth. He was the lowest step of the social ladder. It must be admitted, however, that some of that race, who had been emancipated, or had been born free, had risen, particularly in Louisiana, to wealth and to respectability in the estimation of the whites. Yet they occupied a status resembling that of the Jews in the mediæval ages, and it was a crime punishable with death for one of that

degraded class to strike a white man, however lightly he might weigh in the social scale. Hence, for a long time, to be bought by and to be the slave of one of that class was the most abject degradation into which a poor African could fall. If this statement be true, and it will hardly be denied by anybody conversant with the South, the different strata of the social body with us might be thus classified: the whites, the black or hybrid slaves, the black or hybrid freedmen, and the slaves of the freedmen.

Such was the condition, as I have briefly described it, of the aristocratic South and of the democratic North and West. The latter soon complained of the undue influence of the former in the affairs of the Union. Why undue? It was intellectual and not physical. The Southern States were inferior in population and in wealth. It cannot be material force that compels five able-bodied men to obey one. If it be true, as said by De Tocqueville, that the reign of democracy is the reign of mediocrity, and that aristocracies have always surpassed in statesmanship all the other forms of government, as witnessed by the histories of Rome, Venice, and England, the secret of Southern influence is found out. It arose from the peculiar institution which gave the South all the prestige and advantages of an aristocracy. This assertion, far from being refuted, is proved by the example of Athens, whose influence is still felt in the whole civilized world. What is called the democracy of Athens was aristocratic like the democracy of the Southern States, and much more so; it had nothing in common with modern democracies, as generally understood. Attica was a slave country. The Athenians, individually and collectively as a community, held slaves who worked, some for their masters and some for the commonwealth which owned them for the common welfare. Athens was not a democracy of plebeians, but rather of nobles, and I might say of demigods, for many of them claimed descent from the gods. They did not proclaim that all men were born free and equal, and recommend the amalgamation of races. They proclaimed the reverse. They thought themselves far above the rest of mankind, and they were. No foreigner could be naturalized among them, not even a Greek. As to the other nations, particularly the Asiatics, they were looked upon as utter barbarians. Nay, no one could be an Athenian except one of pure and unadulterated Attic blood through both sides of the house, and the son of Peri