Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/455

1852-eo] Parties and the slavery question. 423 where questions of statesmanship seemed the determining factors in affairs. The effect upon parties was profound, and, when the slavery question forced its way to the front, revolutionary. Local movements of opinion readily made themselves felt in nominating conventions. The delegates from particular localities reflected the most recent opinion of the people from amongst whom they had come; the business of a convention was not to frame legislation, or even to say how it could be framed, but only to reconcile and express opinion; the initiative was with any one who could command the votes. If men of radical views found themselves silenced or ignored in the convention of the party with which they had been in the habit of acting, they could break away and organise a convention of their own. New parties were continually springing up in times of agitation, drawing strength from the old parties, diverting attention to new and singular issues which had found no place in the ordinary party programmes, making the task of states- manship and consistent legislation so much the more difficult and perplexing, and weakening parties without guiding them. The whole system facilitated group movement and an insistence on separate and sectional issues. Group movement inevitably made the regular parties nervous, vacillating, uncertain of their strength, prone to compromise and artificial make-shift reconciliation. It was by such a process that the virtual dissolution of parties was being made evident in the years which preceded and followed the year 1852 ; and the question of slavery was the chief dissolvent. The feeling against slavery had grown very rapidly of late: not the feeling that slavery ought to be abolished in the States in which it was already established for everyone knew that there it was a matter which the Constitution left entirely to the choice of the several commonwealths themselves and put beyond the reach of federal legislation, and beyond the reach therefore of national parties but the "Free-Soil" feeling, the feeling against every attempt to extend the slave-holding system to new regions of settlement and force it upon new States. America had shared with the rest of the world the great philanthropic movements of the earlier part of the century. An "American Anti-Slavery Society" had been established in 1833, the year which witnessed the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire; and the men who organised that Society desired what William Lloyd Garrison demanded in the columns of the Liberator, founded two years before, the immediate and total abolition of slavery throughout the country, with or without the sanction of the Constitution; or, if that were indeed impossible, then the separation of the Free States from the Slave, in order that they at any rate might be purged of the offence. But such sentiments and purposes had not spread among the mass of the people. The institutions of the country had been built from the first, deliberately and consciously built, CH. XIIT.