"We have the will of the people ideally when all desires are satisfied.... The aim of democracy should be integrating desires. I have said that truth emerges from difference. In the ballot-box there is no confronting of difference, hence no possibility of integrating, hence no creating; self-government is a creative process and nothing else.... Democracy does not register various opinions; it is an attempt to create unity."[134] It might be said that in so far as democracy has succeeded, it has done so because of its adherence to this principle. The division of a society into groups which are unremittingly committed to struggle against each other, whether by violent or non-violent means, until one or the other has been annihilated or forced to yield outwardly to its oppressors for the time being, will inevitably destroy the loyalty to a common purpose through which alone democracy can exist. The contrast between the British and American attitudes toward the abolition of slavery presents us with a case in point. In Great Britain, the Emancipation Act contained provisions for the compensation of the slave owners, so that it became acceptable to them. In the United States the advocates of abolition insisted that since slavery was sin there could be no recognition of the rights of the owners. Elihu Burritt and his League of Universal Brotherhood were as much opposed to slavery as the most ardent abolitionists, yet of the League Burritt declared: "It will not only aim at the mutual pacification of enemies, but at their conversion into brethren."[135] Burritt became the chief advocate of compensated emancipation in the United States. Finally the idea was suggested in the Senate and hearings had been arranged on the measure. "But," Burritt said, "just as it had reached that stage at which Congressional action was about to recognize it as a legitimate proposition, 'John Brown's raid' suddenly closed the door against all overtures or efforts for the peaceful extinction of slavery. Its extinction by compensated emancipation would have recognized the moral complicity of the whole nation in planting and perpetuating it on this continent. It would have been an act of repentance, and the meetest work for repentance the nation could perform."[136] The country was already too divided to strive for this "third alternative," and, whether or not slavery was one of the prime causes of the Civil War, it made its contribution to creating the feeling which brought on the conflict. In the light of the present intensity of racial feeling in the United States, it can hardly be said that the enforced settlement of the war gave the Negro an equal place in American society or eliminated conflict between the races.