ittle about the risks, he was prepared to face
them whatever they were. Doubtless he took a heavy responsibility, but
it is painful to find honourable historians, who heartily dislike the
cause of slavery, capable to-day of wondering whether he was right to do
so. "If he had not stood square" in December upon the same "platform" on
which he had stood in May, if he had preferred to enroll himself among
those statesmen of all countries whose strongest words are uttered for
their own subsequent enjoyment in eating them, he might conceivably have
saved much bloodshed, but he would not have left the United States a
country of which any good man was proud to be a citizen.

Thus, by the end of 1860, the bottom was really out of the policy of
compromise, and it is not worth while to examine the praiseworthy efforts
that were still made for it while State after State in the South was
deciding to secede. One interesting proposal, which was aired in
January, 1861, deserves notice, namely, that the terms of compromise
proposed by Crittenden should have been submitted to a vote of the whole
people. It was not passed. Seward, whom many people now thought likely
to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with
justice that it was "unconstitutional and ineffectual." Ineffectual it
would have been in this sense: the compromise would in all probability
have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States
and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good
feeling, had no further definite opinion upon the chief questions at
issue; but it would have left a local majority in many of the Southern
States and a local majority in many of the Northern States as
irreconcilable with each other as ever. It was opposed also to the
spirit of the Constitution. In a great country where the people with
infinitely varied interests and opinions can slowly make their
predominant wishes appear, but cannot really take counsel together and
give a firm decision upon any emergency, there may be exceptional cases
when a popular vote on a defined issue would be valuable, significant,
desired by the people themselves; but the machinery of representative
government, however faulty, is the only machinery by which the people can
in some sense govern itself, instead of making itself ungovernable.
Above all, in a serious crisis it is supremely repugnant to the spirit of
popular government that the me