The dominant power of slavery was not alone responsible for this
depravity. The country was isolated from the world and little
influenced by foreign thought. Its energies were devoted to material
aggrandizement, to the conquest of Nature on a gigantic scale, to
the acquisition of wealth. Since the settlement of the Constitution
moral problems had dropped out of political life and the great
passions of the heroic age had died away. Education was superficial.
Religion was emotional and spasmodic. Business ethics was low.

Party politics was in a chaotic condition. The Whig organization
was not in any proper sense a party at all. It was an ill-assorted
aggregation of political elements, without common opinions or united
purposes, whose only proper function was opposition. It was so
utterly incoherent, its convictions so vague and negative, that it
was unable even to draft a platform. Without any formal declaration
of principles or purposes it had nominated and elected Harrison
and Tyler, one a distinguished soldier and respectable Western
politician, the other a renegade Virginia Democrat, whose Whiggism
consisted solely of a temporary quarrel with his own party. The
one unanimous opinion of the party was that it was better for
themselves, if not for the country, that the Whigs should hold
the offices. The Democrats had been in control of the Government
for forty years. Their professed principles were still broadly
Jeffersonian. Their platform consisted mainly of a denial of all
power in the Federal Government to do anything or prevent anything,
the extravagant negations borrowed from the republican philosophers
of England and the French Revolutionists.

But a half century of power had produced a marked diversion
of practice from principles, and, in spite of its open abnegation