he and he was more than a mere individual. We speak of one who was no more or less than the executive and administrator of the will of the people. Whatever were the ideals and desires and faults of the common people of his day were the ideals and desires and faults of Abraham Lincoln.

It matters not that with the onrushing change of time a new common people has arisen which perhaps would call that other people of Lincoln's day false and of a different calibre from itself. For such in truth were the peculiar conditions of America of the sixties that Lincoln's every act was an act in the name of the common people of the United States; and the ideals he strove for were their ideals. In the light of the present day we can quarrel with their ideal, or, accepting their ideal, we can quarrel with the manner of approach to it, but we cannot quarrel with the new hero of the people. His deeds are knit in the brawn and sinews of the nation. Upon the foundation he helped to lay stands the social order, good or bad, which we enjoy at present. To know him we must know the nation. No, we must go farther back and see how it was, why it was, when so great a crisis in the nation's life broke forth, that the strong and firm hand of Abraham Lincoln was needed to direct its course.

We are usually told that the nation went to war over the question of slavery. True, on the surface. But, when one begins to analyse that slavery, to which one-half the nation objected to so strongly, and for which the other half went to the length of declaring war, one finds, beneath the phrases of the time, that not slavery but property in land was the real cause of

the Civil War. It was not the three million Negroes in chains, not the tortures of the Uncle Toms at the whipping-posts, or the thought of the Elizas running over the broken ice with the blood-hounds behind them, that set the non-slave-holding whites so resolutely against the institution, but the fact that slavery meant large plantations and that they drove the small homesteader from the land. Even then the large landlord of the South might have travelled along peaceably towards the south-west and the small homesteader towards the north-west had not the sudden rise of railways brought the frontier close to civilization and thrust upon the people the problem as to whether the large or small property-owner was to be the first to rush into these newly-opened Eldorados and claim them for his own.

Slavery, from the point of view of the slave, had very little to do with the American Civil War. The freed Negro was not welcomed to the North as a competitor with free labour nor as a fellow property owner with his white neighbour. Slavery was objected to by the small homesteader only because he objected to the large landlord. True, the unskilled workers opposed slavery, on the ground that it degraded their labour and prevented their employment. But the unskilled worker was in a fair way in the fifties and sixties to becoming a small homesteader himself. He was not a labourer "fixed in that condition of life," to quote Lincoln. The skilled who worked in the cities and were fixed in that condition" were in no way touched by the problem and remained, if anything, hostile to an agitation of abolition. "We too are slaves," they said,

"and we have not time to see to the liberation of others." Besides the alignment of forces between the large landlord and the small landlord there was an antagonism between the merchants of the east who desired a high tariff and the planters of the south who were free traders. But the more serious division lay in the west, and was fought over the control of the new territories that were about to be opened.

It was property then, and not liberty which animated the American people in their struggle against the southern slave power. Yet it is typical of American democracy that the words liberty and property should have been interchangeable. The fact has a distinct potent significance in American history. With the riches of nature lying open and unexploited, the liberty to go out and acquire property was the main factor in American democracy, so that all through the country's history we see these successive risings of the many to power. Abstract French ideas of the rights of man were not lacking to sustain the people in what they called "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but these ideas translated meant for the American only the right of an equal economic opportunity to the bounties of nature.

The historic details which lead up to the crisis of 1860 have behind them the same significance -the struggle over property and the winning of the rights to property by the people- that is, by the

many.

From the very beginning the approach of the Old World towards the New was only for exploitation and profit. Private monopolies were formed to hold

b

手

her, which were followed by the monopolies of governments, but the onrush of numbers into the New World kept hammering down the most impregnable of special privileges. In the first years of exploration and colonization monopoly of the land was easy, but labour was difficult to find. The wild backlands gave ready room for the labourer to escape and slavery was resorted to as a means of tying him down to the soil. In those days slavery took no account of race or colour. Native Indians, Negroes, indentured servants, company immigrants, all who could be impressed to work had to work. But the natives revenged themselves by massacres, the indentured servants and company immigrants escaped into the woods to acquire property of their own, and it was only the bewildered Negro who could be brought into this strange land and be kept in bondage forever by the brand of colour.

The discovery of the black race in the same era which produced the discovery of the New World helped to free the white man and the Indian from a serfdom which existed all over Europe at this time. If one could forget that slavery in America was based on colour, the history of American slavery would become simple and readily understood. It was not at all an institution peculiar or indigenous to America, but was part of the problem of large landlordism which existed in Europe even long after the Napoleonic period.

Slavery, it is true, was intensified in America by the home governments in the interests of the home slavers, so that there was often an over-importation of slaves

against which the large landlord in the colonies himself protested. "He has prostituted his negative," wrote Jefferson, indicting George III., "by suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." He had indeed! But the legislative attempts on the part of the colonies were made much more to restrain than to prohibit the trade, for as long as tobacco brought $12 a pound in the London market slaves would be called for. It was the fear of servile insurrection and the fact that in the hundred years of colonization there were already enough slaves in Maryland and Virginia to build up an inter-colonial slave trade that caused the various attempts to place taxes on the importation of slaves-often enough disallowed by the Crown. However, so little were the colonists themselves against slavery that a prohibition against it in Georgia lasted hardly fourteen years. colony was founded for military purposes, and therefore large landlordism and slavery were prohibited in the hope that a sufficient population of small landowners would settle and form an effective outpost against a Spanish invasion. But from the first the regulation against slavery was violated by "hiring" Negroes "for life," and finally by 1749 the restriction against slavery and large estates had to be annulled by the Board of Governors of the colony.

The

And yet at the very same time patriot parties were forming, and ideas of freedom were running riot. They were directed against old-world traditions of hereditary aristocracy and class privilege, and not against the monopoly of wealth.

The large manorial estates of