It is precisely the attitude and essentially the argument which would have surrendered to the South in the sixties, and would have left this country to rot in slavery for another generation.

Plainly, our argument from the adaptability of a belief to man's higher moral needs, vanishes into thin air as soon as the key to the order of nature is thus sought in a blind non-moral tendency, and when that which is lowest is put at the top, and everything above it made to minister to it.

"[420] Precisely the same argument has been used by slave owners from time immemorialthe slaves do not wish to be free.

The city from end to end was one seething storm of heated, typically "Southern" argument and prophecy.