The Life of Stephen A. Douglas | Page 7

malevolence describes him as raving out his hour in abusive invectives, his face convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and lashing himself into such heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burned out.
"In the midst of his roaring," he declares, "to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist." With all its extravagance and exaggeration, it is impossible to doubt the substantial truth of this charicature. Adams did not live to see the young Member become the most powerful debater, the most accomplished political leader and most influential statesman of the great and stirring period that ensued.
The time was strange, as difficult of comprehension to the generation that has grown up since the War as the England of Hengist and Horsa is to the modern Cockney, or the Rome of Tiberius to the present inhabitant of the Palentine Hill. Only sixty years have passed, but with them has passed away civilization, with its modes of thought and sentiment, its ethics and its politics. The country had but one fifth of its present population. A third of our area was still held by Mexico. Wealth was as yet the poet's dream or the philosopher's night-mare. Commerce was a subordinate factor in our civilization. Agriculture was the occupation of the people and the source of wealth. Cotton was king not only in the field of business, but in that of politics. The world still maintained its attitude of patronizing condescension or haughty contempt toward the dubious experiment of "broad and rampant democracy." Dickens had just written his shallow twaddle about Yankee crudeness and folly. Macaulay was soon to tell us that our Constitution was "all sail and no anchor." DeTocqueville had but recently published his appreciative estimate of the New World civilization. Americans knew they had less admiration than they claimed and had lurking doubts that there was some ground for the ill-concealed contempt of the Old World toward the swaggering giant of the New, and a fixed resolve to proclaim their supreme greatness with an energy and persistence that would drown the sneers of all Europe. It was a time of egotism, bluster and brag in our relation to the foreign world, and of truckling submission in our home politics to a dominant power, long since so completely whirled away by the storm of revolution, that it is hard to realize that half a century ago the strongest bowed to its will.
Douglas was in no sense a reformer or the preacher of a crusade. He was ready to cheerfully accept the ethics of the time without criticism or question. Political morality was at its nadir. The dominant power of slavery was not alone responsible for this depravity. The country was isolated from the world and little influenced by foreign thought. Its energies were devoted to material aggrandizement, to the conquest of Nature on a gigantic scale, to the acquisition of wealth. Since the settlement of the Constitution moral problems had dropped out of political life and the great passions of the heroic age had died away. Education was superficial. Religion was emotional and spasmodic. Business ethics was low.
Party politics was in a chaotic condition. The Whig organization was not in any proper sense a party at all. It was an ill-assorted aggregation of political elements, without common opinions or united purposes, whose only proper function was opposition. It was so utterly incoherent, its convictions so vague and negative, that it was unable even to draft a platform. Without any formal declaration of principles or purposes it had nominated and elected Harrison and Tyler, one a distinguished soldier and respectable Western politician, the other a renegade Virginia Democrat, whose Whiggism consisted solely of a temporary quarrel with his own party. The one unanimous opinion of the party was that it was better for themselves, if not for the country, that the Whigs should hold the offices. The Democrats had been in control of the Government for forty years. Their professed principles were still broadly Jeffersonian. Their platform consisted mainly of a denial of all power in the Federal Government to do anything or prevent anything, the extravagant negations borrowed from the republican philosophers of England and the French Revolutionists.
But a half century of power had produced a marked diversion of practice from principles, and, in spite of its open abnegation of power, the Government had become a personal despotism under Jackson, which had vainly struggled to perpetuate itself through the Administration of VanBuren. But notwithstanding the absurd discrepancy of their practical and theoretical politics, the Democrats had one great advantage over the Whigs in having a large and influential body of men united in interest, compelled to defend themselves against