orical sentiment, have been written from the antislavery point of
view. It seems hardly probable that this sentiment will be changed in
any time that we can forecast, but there is an undoubted tendency in the
younger historical students to look upon the expansion of the country as
the important consideration, and the slavery question as incidental.
Professor von Holst thought this changing historical sentiment entirely
natural, but he felt sure that in the end men would come round to the
antislavery view, of which he was so powerful an advocate.

From Taylor to Lincoln slavery dominated all other questions. Taylor was
a Southern man and a slaveholder, and by his course on the Compromise
measures attracted the favor of antislavery men; while Fillmore of New
York, who succeeded this second President to die in office, and who
exerted the power of the Administration to secure the passage of Clay's
Compromise and signed the Fugitive Slave Law, had but a small political
following at the North. Pierce and Buchanan were weak, the more positive
men in their Cabinets and in the Senate swayed them. For a part of both
of their terms the House of Representatives was controlled by the
opposition, the Senate remaining Democratic. These circumstances are
evidence both of the length of time required to change the political
complexion of the Senate and of the increasing power of the North, which
was dominant in the popular House. For the decade before the Civil War
we should study the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme
Court, the action of the states, and popular sentiment. The executive is
still powerful, but he is powerful because he is the representative of a
party or faction which dictates the use that shall be made of his
constitutional powers. The presidential office loses interest:
irresolute men are in the White House, strong men everywhere else.

Lincoln is inaugurated President; the Civil War ensues, and with it an
extraordinary development of the executive power. It is an interesting
fact that the ruler of a republic which sprang from a resistance to the
English king and Parliament should exercise more arbitrary power than
any Englishman since Oliver Cromwell, and that many of his acts should
be worthy of a Tudor. Lincoln was a good lawyer who reverenced the
Constitution and the laws, and only through necessity assumed and
exercised extra-legal powers, trying at the same time to give to these
actions the color o