rmine how far the professional politician was
responsible for the Civil War. But when we recall the fact that
secession followed close on the overthrow of a faction which had long
monopolised the spoils of office, and that this faction found
compensation in the establishment of a new government, it is not easy
to resist the suspicion that the secession movement was neither more
nor less than a conspiracy, hatched by a clever and unscrupulous
cabal.

It would be unwise, however, to brand the whole, or even the
majority, of the Southern leaders as selfish and unprincipled. Unless
he has real grievances on which to work, or unless those who listen
to him are supremely ignorant, the mere agitator is powerless; and it
is most assuredly incredible that seven millions of Anglo-Saxons, and
Anglo-Saxons of the purest strain--English, Lowland Scottish, and
North Irish--should have been beguiled by silver tongues of a few
ambitious or hare-brained demagogues. The latter undoubtedly had a
share in bringing matters to a crisis. But the South was ripe for
revolution long before the presidential election. The forces which
were at work needed no artificial impulse to propel them forward. It
was instinctively recognised that the nation had outgrown the
Constitution; and it was to this, and not to the attacks upon
slavery, that secession was really due. The North had come to regard
the American people as one nation, and the will of the majority as
paramount.* (* "The Government had been Federal under the Articles of
Confederation (1781), but the [Northern] people quickly recognised
that that relation was changing under the Constitution (1789). They
began to discern that the power they thought they had delegated was
in fact surrendered, and that henceforth no single State could meet
the general Government as sovereign and equal." Draper's History of
the American Civil War volume 1 page 286.) The South, on the other
hand, holding, as it had always held, that each State was a nation in
itself, denied in toto that the will of the majority, except in
certain specified cases, had any power whatever; and where political
creeds were in such direct antagonism no compromise was possible.
Moreover, as the action of the abolitionists very plainly showed,
there was a growing tendency in the North to disregard altogether the
rights of the minority. Secession, in fact, was a protest against mob
rule. The weaker community, hopeless of maintaining its m