On those occasions when it _would_ come to the surface,
they contented themselves and public opinion with meaningless
compromises. It would have been well enough to frame compromises suited
to the immediate occasion, provided the problem of ultimately
extinguishing slavery without rending the Union had been kept
persistently on the surface of political discussion: but the object of
these compromises was not to cure the disease, but merely to allay its
symptoms. They would not admit that slavery was a disease; and in the
end this habit of systematic drifting and shirking on the part of
moderate and sensible men threw the national responsibility upon
Abolitionist extremists, in whose hands the issue took such a distorted
emphasis that gradually a peaceable preservation of American national
integrity became impossible.
The problem of slavery was admirably designed to bring out the confusion
of ideas and the inconsistency resident in the traditional American
political system. The groundwork of that system consisted, as we have
seen, in the alliance between democracy, as formulated in the
Jeffersonian creed, and American nationality, as embodied in the
Constitutional Union; and the two dominant political parties of the
Middle Period, the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats, both believed in
the necessity of such an alliance.
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