way into Congress, and who played into the hands of the Northern
capitalists, for a purpose similar to theirs. It was these men
who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned the common people
of the North to mind their own business; and for doing so they
were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class. It was
therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized
capital that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the
Northern hammer"--as Sumner put it, in one of his most furious
speeches--in their aim to destroy a section where, intuitively,
they felt their democratic ideal could not be realized.

And what was that ideal? Merely to answer democracy is to dodge
the fundamental question. The North was too complex in its
social structure and too multitudinous in its interests to
confine itself to one type of life. It included all sorts and
conditions of men--from the most gracious of scholars who lived
in romantic ease among his German and Spanish books, and whose
lovely house in Cambridge is forever associated with the noble
presence of Washington, to the hardy frontiersman, breaking the
new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at sunset shaded her
tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she stood on the
threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her man
across the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued. Far
apart as were Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet
felt themselves to be one in purpose.

They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner
of the democrats at the opening of the century. In the North,
there had come to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had
touched democracy with mysticism and had added to it a vague but