onditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt
presence of a wholesome national ideal. The patriotism of an older
country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in
the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs
no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this
lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness--even its
national cant--with high aspiration, did--it may well be--more than any
strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which
should thereafter seem worth preserving.

4. _The Missouri Compromise_.

No sober critic, applying to the American statesmen of the first
generation the standards which he would apply to their English
contemporaries, can blame them in the least because they framed their
Constitution as best they could and were not deterred by the scruples
which they felt about slavery from effecting a Union between States
which, on all other grounds except their latent difference upon slavery,
seemed meant to be one. But many of these men had set their hands in the
Declaration of Independence to the most unqualified claim of liberty and
equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen
years' grace to "that most detestable sum of all villainies," as Wesley
called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which
thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped slaves to
captivity. "Why," Dr. Johnson had asked, "do the loudest yelps for
liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" We are forced to recognise,
upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the
Union otherwise than as they did; yet a doubt presents itself as to the
general soundness and sincerity of their boasted notions of liberty.
Now, later on we shall have to understand the policy as to slavery on
behalf of which Lincoln stepped forward as a leader. In his own
constantly reiterated words it was a return to the position of "the
fathers," and, though he was not a professional historian, it concerns us
to know that there was sincerity at least in his intensely historical
view of politics. We have, then, to see first how "the fathers"--that
is, the most considerable men among those who won Independence and made
the Constitution--set out with a very honest view on the subject of
slavery, but with a too comfortable hope of its approaching end, which
one or two lived t