ional legislation. Consequently they did not
seek to forbid negro servitude; and inasmuch as it seemed at that time
to be on the road to extinction through the action of natural causes,
the makers of the Constitution had a good excuse for refusing to
sacrifice their whole project to the abolition of slavery, and in
throwing thereby upon the future the burden of dealing with it in some
more radical and consistent way. Later, however, it came to pass that
slavery, instead of being gradually extinguished by economic causes, was
fastened thereby more firmly than ever upon one section of the country.
The whole agricultural, political, and social life of the South became
dominated by the existence of negro slavery; and the problem of
reconciling the expansion of such an institution with the logic of our
national idea was bound to become critical. Our country was committed by
every consideration of national honor and moral integrity to make its
institutions thoroughly democratic, and it could not continue to permit
the aggressive legal existence of human servitude without degenerating
into a glaring example of political and moral hypocrisy.

The two leading political parties deliberately and persistently sought
to evade the issue. The Western pioneers were so fascinated with the
vision of millions of pale-faced democrats, leading free and prosperous
lives as the reward for virtuously taking care of their own business,
that the Constitutional existence of negro slavery did not in the least
discommode them. Disunionism they detested and would fight to the end;
but to waste valuable time in bothering about a perplexing and an
apparently irremediable political problem was in their eyes the worst
kind of economy. They were too optimistic and too superficial to
anticipate any serious trouble in the Promised Land of America; and they
were so habituated to inconsistent and irresponsible political thinking,
that they attached no importance to the moral and intellectual turpitude
implied by the existence of slavery in a democratic nation. The
responsibility of the Whigs for evading the issue is more serious than
that of the Democrats. Their leaders were the trained political thinkers
of their generation. They were committed by the logic of their party
platform to protect the integrity of American national life and to
consolidate its organization. But the Whigs, almost as much as the
Democrats, refused to take seriously the legal existenc