uth would or could be so unfriendly.
It was this hope of compromise and conciliation which lost us forts, and
ships, and millions of dollars in munitions of war; for it was said:
'The South is only boasting, and must not be driven to extremes.' With
eyes wide open to the thefts, the Democratic leaders smiled a languid,
cowardly assent, and let the enemy prepare for war. And war came. It
might have been prevented; it might, beyond all doubt, have been limited
and crushed; but the hand of the braggart South had been so long on the
throat of the doughfaces, that they dared not move, and the doughfaces
were in power. The country at large has had to pay dearly for that old
doughface love for the South; it is paying every day in lives and money.

Even now, it is amazing to see how the leaders among the Democracy,
while pecking the South with the bill, continue to fondle it with the
wing. Again and again, since the war began, they have humiliated the
North and encouraged the desperate foe by efforts at peace-parties,
conciliations, outcries for amnesty, and entreaties not to 'exasperate'
the enemy. They have urged and advocated the maintenance of slavery, the
great cause of Southern arrogance and secession, with as much zeal as
any Southron of them all, and fiercely deprecated any allusion to a
subject which can no more he kept from consciousness than can a deadly
and madly irritating cancer. Every suggestion, even the mildest and most
equitable, for arranging this difficulty, has been stigmatized by them
as out of place and time, while their press has, without exception, as
we believe, given currency to statements denouncing directly as
swindlers and prostitutes the innocent and well-meaning men and women
who went South with the sole object of clothing, nursing, and teaching
the disorganized masses of blacks set free by our army. In all of this,
we have a melancholy illustration of the difficulty with which
unthinking men of the blind mass which rolls itself away into 'parties,'
and follows its leaders, embrace new truths or shake off old habits of
slavery.

While the modern Democratic party firmly believed--as its majority still
seems to--that all this trouble was caused solely by the Abolitionists,
and simply for the sake of liberating some four millions of blacks, they
had at least some color for their iron conservatism. European humanity
did not agree with us; but we of America are more tropical in our
feelings, and so w