ht to appreciate how much the
great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to
maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."

That acquiescence,--a costly sacrifice to the higher good; and the
typical attitude of the Republicans and the moderate anti-slavery
men,--seemed to Garrison and Phillips and their school a sinful
compliance with evil. The extreme Abolitionists, as much as the
extremists of the South, were opposed to the Union. They had no
comprehension of the interests and principles involved in the
preservation of the national life. One of the pleasant traits told of
Garrison's private life is this: He was fond of music, especially
religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he
would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes
with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony.
That was typical of his mental attitude,--he knew and loved the melody
of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he did
not comprehend.

The Southern disunionists finally carried their section, but the
Abolition disunionists never made the slightest approach to converting
the North. It was not merely that many at the North were indifferent to
slavery, while to the whole community its interest was remote compared
to what it was to the South. There was another reason for the failure of
the Northern disunionists. Among the class to whom the appeal for
freedom came closest home, the idealists, the men of moral conviction
and enthusiasm, were many to whose ideality and enthusiasm American
unity also spoke with powerful voice. Patriotism was more to them than a
material interest, more than an enlarged and glowing sentiment of
neighborhood and kinship,--it was devotion to moral interests of which
the national organism was the symbol and the agent. They saw, as Webster
saw, that "America is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in future
and by fate, with these great interests,"--of free representative
government, entire religious liberty, improved systems of national
intercourse, the spirit of free inquiry, and the general diffusion of
knowledge. They looked still higher than this,--they saw that America
rightly tended toward universal personal liberty, and full opportunity
and encouragement to man as man, of whatever race or class. That was
what America stood for to those moral enthusiasts whose sanity matched
their ardo