a revolution which wrought deep changes in the character of the
people. It was the beginning of a new era in our national life.
We are in constant danger of missing the real worth of men in these
ante-bellum years because their modes of thought and feeling were
not those of this generation.

The Civil War, with its storm of passion, banished from our minds
the great men and gigantic struggles of the preceding decade. We
turned with scornful impatience from the pitiful and abortive
compromises of those times, the puerile attempts to cure by futile
plasters the cancer that was eating the vitals of the nation. We
hastily concluded that men who belonged to the party of Jefferson
Davis and Judah P. Benjamin during those critical years were of
doubtful loyalty and questionable patriotism, that men who battled
with Lincoln, Seward and Chase could hardly be true-hearted
lovers of their country. Douglas died too soon to make clear to a
passion-stirred world that he was as warmly attached to the Union,
as intensely loyal, as devotedly patriotic, as Lincoln himself.

The grave questions arising from the War, which disturbed our politics
for twenty years, the great economic questions which have agitated
us for the past fifteen years, bear slight relation to those dark
problems with which Douglas and his contemporaries grappled. He
was on the wrong side of many struggles preliminary to the War.
He was not a profound student of political economy, hence is not
an authority for any party in the perplexing questions of recent
times. The result is that the greatest political leader of the
most momentous decade of our history is less known to us than any
second-rate hero of the Revolution.