and the Union, and that any concession would have a fatally weakening effect.  In 1850 he supported a compromise which was so one-sided that it hardly deserves the name.  The defence offered by his friends on this subject—­and it is the strongest point they have been able to make—­is that these sacrifices, or compromises, were necessary to save the Union, and that—­although they did not prevent ultimate secession—­they caused a delay of ten years, which enabled the North to gather sufficient strength to carry the civil war to a successful conclusion.  It is not difficult to show historically that the policy of compromise between the national principle and unlawful opposition to that principle was an entire mistake from the very outset, and that if illegal and partisan State resistance had always been put down with a firm hand, civil war might have been avoided.  Nothing strengthened the general government more than the well-judged and well-timed display of force by which Washington and Hamilton crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, or than the happy accident of peace in 1814, which brought the separatist movement in New England to a sudden end.  After that period Mr. Clay’s policy of compromise prevailed, and the result was that the separatist movement was identified with the maintenance of slavery, and steadily gathered strength.  In 1819 the South threatened and blustered in order to prevent the complete prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana purchase.  In 1832 South Carolina passed the nullification ordinance because she suffered by the operation of a protective tariff.  In 1850 a great advance had been made in their pretensions.  Secession was threatened because the South feared that the Mexican conquests would not be devoted to the service of slavery.  Nothing had been done, nothing was proposed even, prejudicial to Southern interests; but the inherent weakness of slavery, and the mild conciliatory attitude of Northern statesmen, incited the South to make imperious demands for favors, and seek for positive gains.  They succeeded in 1850, and in 1860 they had reached the point at which they were ready to plunge the country into the horrors of civil war solely because they lost an election.  They believed, first, that the North would yield everything for the sake of union, and secondly, that if there was a limit to their capacity for surrender in this direction, yet a people capable of so much submission in the past would never fight to maintain the Union.  The South made a terrible mistake, and was severely punished for it; but the compromises of 1820, 1833, and 1850 furnished some excuse for the wild idea that the North would not and could not fight.  Whether a strict adherence to the strong, fearless policy of Hamilton, which was adopted by Jackson and advocated by Webster in 1832-33, would have prevented civil war, must, of course, remain matter of conjecture.  It is at least certain that in that way alone could war have been avoided, and that the Clay policy of compromise made war inevitable by encouraging slave-holders to believe that they could always obtain anything they wanted by a sufficient show of violence.