limitations embodied the only living national body of opinion, and he remained untainted by this outburst of heresy.  He deprived it of all vitality by depriving its separate explosions, Abolitionism excepted, of all serious attention.  He crushed it far more effectually by indifference than he would have by persecution.  When the shock of the Civil War aroused Americans to a realization of the unpleasant political realities sometimes associated with the neglect of a “noble national theory,” the ferment subsided without leaving behind so much as a loaf of good white bread.

For practical political purposes it exhausted itself, as I have said, in Abolitionism, and in that movement both its strength and weakness are writ plain.  Its revolt on behalf of emancipation was courageous and sincere.  The patriotism which inspired it recognized the need of justifying its protestantism by a better conception of democracy.  But the heresy was as incoherent and as credulous as the antithetic orthodoxy.  It sought to accomplish an intellectual revolution without organizing either an army or an armament—­just as the pioneer democrat expected to convert untutored enthusiasm into acceptable technical work, and a popular political and economic atomism into a substantially socialized community.  In its meaning and effect, consequently, the revolt was merely negative and anti-national.  It served a constructive democratic purpose only by the expensive and dubious means of instigating a Civil War.  If any of the other heresies of the period, as well as Abolitionism, had developed into an effective popular agitation, they could have obtained a similar success only by means of incurring a similar danger.  The intellectual ideals of the movement were not educational, and its declaration of intellectual independence issued in as sterile a programme for the Republic of American thought as did the Declaration of Political Independence for the American national democracy.

In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at all in relation to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.  They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods, ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against the real enemy of American intellectual independence.  They never dreamed of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby demanded.  They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and enlightened selfishness.  The New World and the new American idea had released them from the bonds in which less fortunate Europeans were entangled.  Those bonds were not to be considered as the terms under which excellent individual and social purposes were necessarily to be achieved.  They were bad habits, which the dead past had imposed upon the inhabitants of the Old World, and from which Americans could be emancipated by virtue of their abundant faith in human nature and the boundless natural opportunities of the new continent.