It was the antagonistic political tendencies of the two systems
which the first Napoleon was contemplating when he predicted that Europe
would ultimately be either all Cossack or all republican. Never did
human sagacity utter a more pregnant truth. The two systems are at once
perceived to be incongruous. But they are more than incongruous--they
are incompatible. They never have permanently existed together in
one country, and they never can. It would be easy to demonstrate this
impossibility, from the irreconcilable contrast between their great
principles and characteristics. But the experience of mankind has
conclusively established it. Slavery, as I have already intimated,
existed in every state in Europe. Free labor has supplanted it
everywhere except in Russia and Turkey. State necessities developed in
modern times are now obliging even those two nations to encourage and
employ free labor; and already, despotic as they are, we find them
engaged in abolishing slavery. In the United States, slavery came into
collision with free labor at the close of the last century, and fell
before it in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
but triumphed over it effectually, and excluded it for a period yet
undetermined, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.
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