though welcomed on all sides as a final
settlement, failed as completely as the Missouri Compromise had
succeeded. It has already been said that the fault was not in any lack
of skill in the actual framing of the plan. As a piece of political
workmanship it was even superior to Clay's earlier masterpiece, as the
rally to it at the moment of all but the extreme factions, North and
South, sufficiently proves. That it did not stand the wear of a few
years as well as the earlier settlement had stood the wear of twenty was
due to a change in conditions, and to understand that change it is
necessary to take up again the history of the Slavery Question where the
founders of the Republic left it.

It can hardly be said that these great men were wrong in tolerating
Slavery. Without such toleration at the time the Union could not have
been achieved and the American Republic could not have come into being.
But it can certainly be said that they were wrong in the calculation by
means of which they largely justified such toleration not so much to
their critics as to their own consciences. They certainly expected, when
they permitted Slavery for a season, that Slavery would gradually weaken
and disappear. But as a fact it strengthened itself, drove its roots
deeper, gained a measure of moral prestige, and became every year harder
to destroy.

Whence came their miscalculation? In part no doubt it was connected with
that curious and recurrent illusion which postulates in human affairs--a
thing called "Progress." This illusion, though both logically and
practically the enemy of reform--for if things of themselves tend to
grow better, why sweat and agonize to improve them?--is none the less
characteristic, generally speaking, of reforming epochs, and it was not
without its hold over the minds of the American Fathers. But there were
also certain definite causes, some of which they could hardly have
foreseen, some of which they might, which account for the fact that
Slavery occupied a distinctly stronger position halfway through the
nineteenth century than it had seemed to do at the end of the
eighteenth.

The main cause was an observable fact of psychology, of which a thousand
examples could be quoted, and which of itself disposes of the whole
"Progressive" thesis--the ease with which the human conscience gets used
to an evil. Time, so far from being a remedy--as the "Progressives" do
vainly talk--is always, while no remedy is attempt