n ranks. They worked in the North and the
Republican party was essentially Northern. It was moreover--at least so
far as the majority of its members were concerned--committed to
protective tariffs, a sound monetary and banking system, the promotion
of railways and industry by land grants, and the development of internal
improvements. It was furthermore generous in its immigration policy. It
proclaimed America to be an asylum for the oppressed of all countries
and flung wide the doors for immigrants eager to fill the factories, man
the mines, and settle upon Western lands. In a word the Republicans
stood for all those specific measures which favored the enlargement and
prosperity of business. At the same time they resisted government
interference with private enterprise. They did not regulate railway
rates, prosecute trusts for forming combinations, or prevent railway
companies from giving lower rates to some shippers than to others. To
sum it up, the political theories of the Republican party for three
decades after the Civil War were the theories of American
business--prosperous and profitable industries for the owners and "the
full dinner pail" for the workmen. Naturally a large portion of those
who flourished under its policies gave their support to it, voted for
its candidates, and subscribed to its campaign funds.

=Sources of Republican Strength in the North.=--The Republican party was
in fact a political organization of singular power. It originated in a
wave of moral enthusiasm, having attracted to itself, if not the
abolitionists, certainly all those idealists, like James Russell Lowell
and George William Curtis, who had opposed slavery when opposition was
neither safe nor popular. To moral principles it added practical
considerations. Business men had confidence in it. Workingmen, who
longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land
policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West. The
immigrant, landing penniless on these shores, as a result of the same
beneficent system, often found himself in a little while with an estate
as large as many a baronial domain in the Old World. Under a Republican
administration, the union had been saved. To it the veterans of the war
could turn with confidence for those rewards of service which the
government could bestow: pensions surpassing in liberality anything that
the world had ever seen. Under a Republican administration also the
great