1848 it was nearly 300,000. From that time, with occasional backsets,
Mr. Roosevelt's "political criminals" went steadily forward until they
mastered the situation. From the first, they were a power in the land,
causing the older parties to quake, Belshazzar-like, at sight of their
writing on the wall.

But according to Mr. Roosevelt, the men of the Liberty-Free-Soil party
had no share in fathering and nurturing the Republican party, to which
he assigns all the credit for crushing slavery. Says he, "The Liberty
party was not in any sense the precursor of the Republican party,
which was based as much on expediency as on abstract right." It is
very true that many Republicans, especially in the earlier days, were
neither Abolitionists nor Anti-Slavery people. A good many of them,
like Abraham Lincoln, were sentimentally adverse to slavery, but under
existing conditions did not want it disturbed. Many of them, having
broken loose from the old parties, had no other place of shelter and
cared nothing for slavery one way or the other, some being of the
opinion of one of the new party leaders whom the writer hereof heard
declare that "the niggers are just where they ought to be." All this,
however, does not prove that the third-party people were not the real
forerunners and founders of the Republican party. They certainly
helped to break up the old organizations, crushing them in whole or
part. They supplied a contingent of trained and desperately earnest
workers, their hearts being enlisted as well as their hands. And what
was of still greater consequence, they furnished an issue, and one
that was very much alive, around which the detached fragments of the
old parties could collect and unite. Their share in the composition
and development of the new party can be illustrated. Out in our great
midland valley two rivers--the Missouri and the Mississippi--meet and
mingle their waters. The Missouri, although the larger stream, after