own himself? Nevertheless, the
effect, and to a great extent the intention, of these laws was to defeat
the claim of _bona fide_ owners to fugitive slaves, and as such they
violated at least the spirit of the constitutional compact. They
therefore afforded a justification for Clay's proposal to transfer the
power of recovering fugitive slaves to the Federal authorities. But they
also afforded an even stronger justification for Lincoln's doubt as to
whether the American Commonwealth could exist permanently half slave and
half free.

Finally, among the causes which made a sectional struggle the more
inevitable must be counted one to which allusion has already been made
in connection with the Presidential Election of 1848--the increasingly
patent unreality of the existing party system. I have already said that
a party system can endure only if it becomes unreal, and it may be well
here to make clear how this is so.

Fundamental debates in a Commonwealth must be _settled_, or the
Commonwealth dies. How, for instance, could England have endured if,
throughout the eighteenth century, the Stuarts had alternately been
restored and deposed every seven years? Or, again, suppose a dispute so
fundamental as that between Collectivism and the philosophy of private
property. How could a nation continue to exist if a Collectivist
Government spent five years in attempting the concentration of all the
means of production in the hands of the State and an Anti-Collectivist
Government spent the next five years in dispersing them again, and so on
for a generation? American history, being the history of a democracy,
illustrates this truth with peculiar force. The controversy between
Jefferson and Hamilton was about realities. The Jeffersonians won, and
the Federalist Party disappeared. The controversy between Jackson and
the Whigs was originally also real. Jackson won, and the Whigs would
have shared the fate of the Federalists if they stood by their original
principles and refused to accept the consequences of the Jacksonian
Revolution. As a fact, however, they did accept these consequences and
so the party system endured, but at the expense of its reality. There
was no longer any fundamental difference of principle dividing Whigs
from Democrats: they were divided arbitrarily on passing questions of
policy, picked up at random and changing from year to year. Meanwhile a
new reality was dividing the nation from top to bottom, but was dividin