omplished little even for the individual, because it was not the
outcome of any fruitful individual discipline. The emancipated idea was
usually defined by seeking the opposite of the conventional idea.
Individuality was considered to be a matter of being somehow and anyhow
different from other people. There was no authentic intellectual
discipline behind the agitation. The pioneer democrat with all his
limitations embodied the only living national body of opinion, and he
remained untainted by this outburst of heresy. He deprived it of all
vitality by depriving its separate explosions, Abolitionism excepted, of
all serious attention. He crushed it far more effectually by
indifference than he would have by persecution. When the shock of the
Civil War aroused Americans to a realization of the unpleasant political
realities sometimes associated with the neglect of a "noble national
theory," the ferment subsided without leaving behind so much as a loaf
of good white bread.

For practical political purposes it exhausted itself, as I have said, in
Abolitionism, and in that movement both its strength and weakness are
writ plain. Its revolt on behalf of emancipation was courageous and
sincere. The patriotism which inspired it recognized the need of
justifying its protestantism by a better conception of democracy. But
the heresy was as incoherent and as credulous as the antithetic
orthodoxy. It sought to accomplish an intellectual revolution without
organizing either an army or an armament--just as the pioneer democrat
expected to convert untutored enthusiasm into acceptable technical work,
and a popular political and economic atomism into a substantially
socialized community. In its meaning and effect, consequently, the
revolt was merely negative and anti-national. It served a constructive
democratic purpose only by the expensive and dubious means of
instigating a Civil War. If any of the other heresies of the period, as
well as Abolitionism, had developed into an effective popular agitation,
they could have obtained a similar success only by means of incurring a
similar danger. The intellectual ideals of the movement were not
educational, and its declaration of intellectual independence issued in
as sterile a programme for the Republic of American thought as did the
Declaration of Political Independence for the American national
democracy.

In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at
all in relation