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to the Union, while, of the Slave States, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri1 did not unite with the Confederacy, the preponderance of population in the adhering over that of the seceded States was somewhat more than two to one.
The disparity in wealth between the contending parties was at least equal to this; so that there was plausibility in the claim of the Confederates to that sympathy which the generous usually extend to the weaker party in a life-and-death struggle.
In Manufactures, Commerce, Shipping, etc., the preponderance was immensely on the side of the Union.
II.
The prestige of regularity, of legitimacy, and of whatever the Old World implies by the comprehensive term “Order,” was likewise on the side of the Union.
The Confederacy appeared as a disturber of preexisting arrangements, and thus of the general peace.
Its fundamental theories of State Sovereignty, Right of Secession, etc., were utter novelties to the mass of mankind, and were at war with the instincts and prepossessions of nearly all who could understand them.
The greatness and security, wealth and power, of England were based on the supersedure of the Heptarchy by the Realm, and on the conversion of Scotland and Ireland, respectively, from jealous and hostile neighbors into integral portions of the British commonwealth.
France, feeble and distracted while divided into great feudatories, became strong and commanding from the hour that these were absorbed into the power and influence of the monarchy, and Burgundy, Picardy, Anjou, etc., became mere geographical designations of portions of the nation “one and indivisible.”
Italy, through her at length half-realized aspirations of so many weary centuries — Germany, still in fragments, in defiance of her ardent hopes and wishes, the imposing and venerable anarchy that Voltaire pronounced her, four generations back — Poland, through her lamentable partition — and nearly every great calamity which modern history had taught mankind to deplore — protested against such disintegrations as the Confederacy had initiated, and not less against the principles on which they were justified.
And especially did the Democracy of Europe — the party of Progress and Reform of whatever country — instinctively revolt against doctrines and practices which tended unmistakably backward to the ages alike of national and of individual impotence, wherein peoples were weak, though castes were strong; to the ages of barbarism and of feudalism, wherein nobles and chieftains were mighty, but laws and magistrates of small account.
The Democracy of Europe were never for one moment misled or confused by the Confederates' pretensions as to reserved rights and constitutional liberty.
Their instinct at once recognized their deadly foe through all his specious disguises.
Men who had, as conspirators and revolutionists, been tenanting by turns the dungeons and dodging the gibbets of “Divine right” from boyhood, repudiated with loathing any affiliation with this rebellion; and no word of cheer ever reached the ears of its master-spirits from Kossuth, Mazzini,
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