ive. The spirit of the times was against
them. The Whigs represented the higher standards, the more definite
organization, and the social inequalities of the older states, but when
they attempted to make their ideas good, they were faced by a dilemma
either horn of which was disastrous to their interests. They were
compelled either to sacrifice their standards to the conditions of
popular efficiency or the chance of success to the integrity of their
standards. In point of fact they pursued precisely the worst course of
all. They abandoned their standards, and yet they failed to achieve
success. Down to the Civil War the fruits of victory and the prestige of
popularity were appropriated by the Democrats.

The Whigs, like their predecessors, the Federalists, were ostensibly the
party of national ideas. Their association began with a group of
Jeffersonian Republicans who, after the second English war, sought to
resume the interrupted work of national consolidation. The results of
that war had clearly exposed certain grave deficiencies in the American
national organization; and these deficiencies a group of progressive
young men, under the lead of Calhoun and Clay, proposed to remedy. One
of the greatest handicaps from which the military conduct of the war had
suffered was the lack of any sufficient means of internal communication;
and the construction of a system of national roads and waterways became
an important plank in their platform. There was also proposed a policy
of industrial protection which Calhoun supported by arguments so
national in import and scope that they might well have been derived
from Hamilton's report. Under the influence of similar ideas the
National Bank was rechartered; and as the correlative of this
constructive policy, a liberal nationalistic interpretation of the
Constitution was explicitly advocated. As one reads the speeches
delivered by some of these men, particularly by Calhoun, during the
first session of Congress after the conclusion of peace, it seems as if
a genuine revival had taken place of Hamiltonian nationalism, and that
this revival was both by way of escaping Hamilton's fatal distrust of
democracy and of avoiding the factious and embittered opposition of the
earlier period.

The Whigs made a fair start, but unfortunately they ran a poor race and
came to a bad end. No doubt they were in a way an improvement on the
Federalists, in that they, like their opponents, the Democrats, st