at about the
Bolsheviki?

II

Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out
of whack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and
then the Democrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long
interruption, the Democrats again. English political experience repeats
itself in America.

A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It
becomes in time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute,
and, the average man being something of a fool, the label easily catches
him. Hence the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. The
institution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as the
paramount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here
in its ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the
South at a good price, and turned pious. The South took the bait and
went crazy.

Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as the Prohibitionists are
going to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of assembly--or
still better, by Constitutional amendment--were the short-haired women
and the long-haired men of Boston going to make a white man out of the
black man by Abolition. The Southern Whigs could not see it and would
not stand for it. So they fell in behind the Democrats. The Northern
Whigs, having nowhere else to go, joined the Republicans.

The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned
that the South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against
incredible odds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran
wild. Extremism had its fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War
of Sections--a fraternal war if ever there was one--brought on by
alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon the
credulity and ignorance of the people.

Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier
and shows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might
have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been
compromised from time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor
even at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. The
institution untenable, modern thought against it, from the first it was
doomed.

But the extremists would not have it. Each played to the lead of the
other. Whilst Wendell Phillips was preaching th