constantly on guard
with regard to tariff, unceasingly fearful that protection would be
imposed on it by Northern and Western votes. To have to sell its cotton
in England at free trade values, but at the same time to have to buy its
commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers--what
did that mean but the despotism of one section over another? When
the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed, a general
Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.

This, Lincoln {Missing text}. Again it is to be accounted for in part
by his near horizon. Had he lived at Washington, had he met, frequently,
Southern men; had he passed those crucial years of the 'fifties in
debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments
on the circuit; perhaps all this would have been otherwise. But one can
not be quite sure. Finance never appealed to him. A wide application may
be given to Herndon's remark that "he had no money sense." All the rest
of the Republican doctrine finds its best statement in Lincoln. On the
one subject of its economic policy he is silent. Apparently it is to be
classified with the routine side of the law. To neither was he ever able
to give more than a perfunctory attention. As an artist in politics he
had the defect of his qualities.

What his qualities showed him were two things: the alliance of the
plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the
essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people. Hence
his conclusion which became his party's conclusion: that, in the South,
a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This
was not the truth. Lincoln's defects in 1860 limited his vision.
Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near
horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error.
The palpable evidence all confirmed it. What might have contradicted it
was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit. Just
what a nature like Lincoln's, if only he could have met them, would have
perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas's, no matter
how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor
comprehend. It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom
his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing
Lincoln it was denied. In a word, the Southern reaction against the
Republicans, like the Republican movement itself