But this fear that Lincoln did not allow for, possessed already a great many minds.  Thousands of Southerners, of the sort whom Lincoln credited with good intentions about slavery, feared the Abolitionists Not because the Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery, but because they wanted to do so fiercely, cruelly.  Like Lincoln, these Southerners who were liberals in thought and moderates in action, did not know what to do about slavery.  Like Lincoln, they had but one fixed idea with regard to it,—­slavery must not be terminated violently.  Lincoln, despite his near horizon, sensed them correctly as not being at one with the great plutocrats who wished to exploit slavery.  But when the Abolitionist poured out the same fury of vituperation on every sort of slave-holder; when he promised his soul that it should yet have the joy of exulting in the ruin of all such, the moderate Southerners became as flint.  When the Abolitionists proclaimed their affiliation with the new party, the first step was taken toward a general Southern coalition to stop the Republican advance.

There was another positive element blended into the negative coalition.  In 1857, the Republicans overruling the traditions of those members who had once been Democrats, set their faces toward protection.  To most of the Northerners the fatefulness of the step was not obvious.  Twenty years had passed since a serious tariff controversy had shaken the North.  Financial difficulties in the ’fifties were more prevalent in the North than in the South.  Business was in a quandary.  Labor was demanding better opportunities.  Protection as a solution, or at least as a palliative, seemed to the mass of the Republican coalition, even to the former Democrats for all their free trade traditions, not outrageous.  To the Southerners it was an alarm bell.  The Southern world was agricultural; its staple was cotton; the bulk of its market was in England.  Ever since 1828, the Southern mind had been constantly on guard with regard to tariff, unceasingly fearful that protection would be imposed on it by Northern and Western votes.  To have to sell its cotton in England at free trade values, but at the same time to have to buy its commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers—­what did that mean but the despotism of one section over another?  When the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed, a general Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.

This, Lincoln {Missing text}.  Again it is to be accounted for in part by his near horizon.  Had he lived at Washington, had he met, frequently, Southern men; had he passed those crucial years of the ’fifties in debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments on the circuit; perhaps all this would have been otherwise.  But one can not be quite sure.  Finance never appealed to him.  A wide application may be given to Herndon’s remark that “he had no money sense.”  All the rest of the Republican doctrine finds its best statement in Lincoln.  On the one subject of its economic policy he is silent.  Apparently it is to be classified with the routine side of the law.  To neither was he ever able to give more than a perfunctory attention.  As an artist in politics he had the defect of his qualities.