administration found itself of applying this old truth to new
relations. Nor were the opposition his only nor his most dangerous
opponents.

The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which
ethics were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than
usual. Their leaders were trained to a method of oratory which
relied for its effect rather on the moral sense than the
understanding. Their arguments were drawn, not so much from
experience as from general principles of right and wrong. When the
war came, their system continued to be applicable and effective, for
here again the reason of the people was to be reached and kindled
through their sentiments. It was one of those periods of
excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
*country, human rights, democracy,* a meaning and a force beyond
that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions,
maintained and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That
penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make
their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the
great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something
which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or
the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be
warmed over into anything better than cant,--and phrases, when
once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has
ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables
them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the lessons taught
by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than
this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men
except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so