at a price consistent with his own welfare. The abolition
of slavery itself, while due in part to direct moral appeal and
political sagacity, was largely the result of the economic collapse of
the large-farming slave system.

96. ~The Lesson for Americans.~ It may be doubted if ever before such
political mistakes as the slavery compromises of the Constitutional
Convention had such serious results, and yet, by a succession of
unexpected accidents, still left a nation in position to work out its
destiny. No American can study the connection of slavery with United
States history, and not devoutly pray that his country may never have a
similar social problem to solve, until it shows more capacity for such
work than it has shown in the past. It is neither profitable nor in
accordance with scientific truth to consider that whatever the
constitutional fathers did was right, or that slavery was a plague sent
from God and fated to be eliminated in due time. We must face the fact
that this problem arose principally from the cupidity and carelessness
of our ancestors. It was the plain duty of the colonies to crush the
trade and the system in its infancy: they preferred to enrich themselves
on its profits. It was the plain duty of a Revolution based upon
"Liberty" to take steps toward the abolition of slavery: it preferred
promises to straightforward action. It was the plain duty of the
Constitutional Convention, in founding a new nation, to compromise with
a threatening social evil only in case its settlement would thereby be
postponed to a more favorable time: this was not the case in the slavery
and the slave-trade compromises; there never was a time in the history
of America when the system had a slighter economic, political, and moral
justification than in 1787; and yet with this real, existent, growing
evil before their eyes, a bargain largely of dollars and cents was
allowed to open the highway that led straight to the Civil War.
Moreover, it was due to no wisdom and foresight on the part of the
fathers that fortuitous circumstances made the result of that war what
it was, nor was it due to exceptional philanthropy on the part of their
descendants that that result included the abolition of slavery.

With the faith of the nation broken at the very outset, the system of
slavery untouched, and twenty years' respite given to the slave-trade to
feed and foster it, there began, with 1787, that system of bargaining,
truckling, a