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That no Whig rose to the occasion is an indication
that in sacrificing their ideas they were sacrificing also their
personal integrity. Intellectual insincerity and irresponsibility was in
the case of the Democrats the outcome of their lives and their point of
view; but on the part of the Whigs it was equivalent to sheer
self-prostitution. Jefferson's work had been done only too well. The
country had become so entirely possessed by a system of individual
aggrandizement, national drift, and mental torpor that the men who for
their own moral and intellectual welfare should have opposed it, were
reduced to the position of hangers-on; and the dangers of the situation
were most strikingly revealed by the attitude which contemporary
statesmen assumed towards the critical national problem of the
period,--the problem of the existence of legalized slavery in a
democratic state.


CHAPTER IV

I
SLAVERY AND AMERICAN NATIONALITY
Both the Whig and the Democratic parties betrayed the insufficiency of
their ideas by their behavior towards the problem of slavery.


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