the correlative ideas, at least it was solid alliance. The Western
Democrats were suspicious of any increase of the national organization
in power and scope, but they were even more determined that it should be
neither shattered nor vitally injured. Although they were unable to
grasp the meaning of their own convictions, the Federal Union really
meant to them something more than an indissoluble legal contract. It was
rooted in their life. It was one of those things for which they were
willing to fight; and their readiness to fight for the national idea was
the great salutary fact. Our country was thereby saved from the
consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy,
and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the
followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was
preserved.

Be it immediately remarked, however, that the pioneer Democrats were
obliged to fight for the Union, just because they were not interested in
its progressive consummation. They willed at one and the same time that
the Union _should_ be preserved, but that it _should not_ be increased
and strengthened. They were national in feeling, but local and
individualistic in their ideas; and these limited ideas were associated
with a false and inadequate conception of democracy. Jefferson had
taught them to believe that any increase of the national organization
was inimical to democracy. The limitations of their own economic and
social experience and of their practical needs confirmed them in this
belief. Their manner of life made them at once thoroughly loyal and
extremely insubordinate. They combined the sincerest patriotism with an
energetic and selfish individualism; and they failed wholly to realize
any discrepancy between these two dominant elements in their life. They
were to love their country, but they were to work for themselves; and
nothing wrong could happen to their country, provided they preserved its
institutions and continued to enjoy its opportunities. Their failure to
grasp the idea that the Federal Union would not take care of itself,
prevented them from taking disunionist ideas seriously, and encouraged
them to provoke a crisis, which, subsequently, their fundamental loyalty
to the Union prevented from becoming disastrous. They expected their
country to drift to a safe harbor in the Promised Land, whereas the
inexorable end of a drifting ship is either the rocks or the shoals.