Great changes in the political and economical life of a nation seldom take place abruptly. The forces responsible for a change or modification of conditions are generally at work long before the final result. Nations, like individuals, grope for the truth, forming different opinions, trying different plans--now radical, now conservative--often failing to see and grasp the solution when it is at hand, but all the while bringing about conditions which, when the crisis comes, form a solid and decisive basis for action. Such is the history of this country with reference to slavery for the three decades prior to the Civil War. From 1833 to the organization of the Republican Party, and after that event to the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, public opinion was incessantly agitated by the organized efforts of the Abolitionists, although they differed among themselves and divided as to the best plan under which to act. While the Northerners grouped into the Whig and Democratic Parties, and condemned the constant agitation of the slavery question as disturbing the public peace and jeopardizing party success, still they could not help recognizing the cogency of the abolition argument; and as year after year went by, and the aggressions of the slave power continued, a steady change went on in the North and the anti-slavery sentiment became more and more pronounced. When active political opposition to slavery finally began it found the North not exactly unanimous as to what should be done, but with her mind almost made up on one point, that slavery should at least be restricted to the territory it then occupied; it required a great political shock, such as came in 1854, to amalgamate this sentiment. From this standpoint the opinions in the North reached out to the extreme views of Garrison and his followers, that slavery should be stamped out regardless of all consequences.