democracy both falsified the spirit in which our institutions had
originated, and seriously compromised their future success. The Union
had been wrought by virtue of vigorous, responsible, and enterprising
leadership, and of sound and consistent political thinking. It was to be
perpetuated by a company of men, who disbelieved in enterprising and
responsible leadership, and who had abandoned and tended to disparage
anything but the most routine political ideas. The American people,
after passing through a period of positive achievement, distinguished in
all history for the powerful application of brains to the solution of an
organic political problem--the American people, after this almost
unprecedented exhibition of good-will and good judgment, proceeded to
put a wholly false interpretation on their remarkable triumph. They
proceeded, also, to cultivate a state of mind which has kept them
peculiarly liable to intellectual ineptitude and conformity. The mixture
of optimism, conservatism, and superficiality, which has until recently
characterized their political point of view, has made them almost blind
to the true lessons of their own national experience.

The best that can be said on behalf of this traditional American system
of political ideas is that it contained the germ of better things. The
combination of Federalism and Republicanism which formed the substance
of the system, did not constitute a progressive and formative political
principle, but it pointed in the direction of a constructive formula.
The political leaders of the "era of good feeling" who began to use with
some degree of conviction certain comely phrases about the eternal and
inseparable alliance between "liberty and union" were looking towards
the promised land of American democratic fulfillment. As we shall see,
the kind of liberty and the kind of union which they had in mind were by
no means indissolubly and inseparably united; and both of these words
had to be transformed from a negative and legal into a positive moral