was fastened thereby more firmly than ever upon one section of the country.  The whole agricultural, political, and social life of the South became dominated by the existence of negro slavery; and the problem of reconciling the expansion of such an institution with the logic of our national idea was bound to become critical.  Our country was committed by every consideration of national honor and moral integrity to make its institutions thoroughly democratic, and it could not continue to permit the aggressive legal existence of human servitude without degenerating into a glaring example of political and moral hypocrisy.

The two leading political parties deliberately and persistently sought to evade the issue.  The Western pioneers were so fascinated with the vision of millions of pale-faced democrats, leading free and prosperous lives as the reward for virtuously taking care of their own business, that the Constitutional existence of negro slavery did not in the least discommode them.  Disunionism they detested and would fight to the end; but to waste valuable time in bothering about a perplexing and an apparently irremediable political problem was in their eyes the worst kind of economy.  They were too optimistic and too superficial to anticipate any serious trouble in the Promised Land of America; and they were so habituated to inconsistent and irresponsible political thinking, that they attached no importance to the moral and intellectual turpitude implied by the existence of slavery in a democratic nation.  The responsibility of the Whigs for evading the issue is more serious than that of the Democrats.  Their leaders were the trained political thinkers of their generation.  They were committed by the logic of their party platform to protect the integrity of American national life and to consolidate its organization.  But the Whigs, almost as much as the Democrats, refused to take seriously the legal existence of slavery.  They shirked the problem whenever they could and for as long as they could; and they looked upon the men who persisted in raising it aloft as perverse fomenters of discord and trouble.  The truth is, of course, that both of the dominant parties were merely representing the prevailing attitude towards slavery of American public opinion.  That attitude was characterized chiefly by moral and intellectual cowardice.  Throughout the whole of the Middle Period the increasing importance of negro servitude was the ghost in the house of the American democracy.  The good Americans of the day sought to exorcise the ghost by many amiable devices.  Sometimes they would try to lock him up in a cupboard; sometimes they would offer him a soothing bribe; more often they would be content with shutting their eyes and pretending that he was not present.  But in proportion as he was kindly treated he persisted in intruding, until finally they were obliged to face the alternative, either of giving him possession of the house or taking possession of it themselves.