On this issue the Democratic party, as a political organization, made up traditionally of the southern element which has been described, of so much of the old northern Democratic party as had not been repelled by the recent advances in Southern demands, and of the large body of immigrants who regarded that party as the poor man’s and the immigrant’s friend, fell out of the place it had occupied as the representative of the great democratic tide which flows through and forms our political history. This movement has been in favor of equality. It has borne down and obliterated all the traditions and prejudices which were inherited from the Old World. It has eliminated from our history almost all recollection of the old Federal party, with its ideas of social and political leadership. It has crushed out the prestige of wealth and education in politics. It has, by narrow tenures, and by cutting away all terms of language and ceremonial observances tending to mark official rank, restrained the respect and authority due to office. The Northern hatred of slavery in the later days was due more to the feeling that it was undemocratic than to the feeling that it was immoral. It was always an anomaly that the Virginians should be democrats _par excellence_, and should regard the yeomen farmers of New England as aristocrats, when, on any correct definitions or standards, the New England States were certainly the most democratic commonwealths in the world. Slavery was an obvious bar to any such classification; and when slavery became a political issue, the parties found their consistent and logical position. The rise and victory of the Republican party was only a continuation of the same grand movement for equality. The old disputes between Federalists and Jeffersonians had ended in such a complete victory for the latter, that the rising generation would have enumerated the Jeffersonian doctrines as axioms or definitions of American institutions. Every schoolboy could dogmatize about natural and inalienable rights, about the conditions under which men are created, about the rights of the majority, and about liberty. The same doctrines are so held to-day by the mass of the people, and they are held so implicitly that corollaries are deduced from them with a more fearless logic than is employed upon political questions anywhere else in the world. Even scholars and philosophers who reflect upon them and doubt them are slow to express their dissent, so jealous and quick is the popular judgment of an attempt upon them. The Democratic party of the fifties was, therefore, false to its fundamental principle of equality when it followed its alliance with the South and allowed itself to be carried against equality for negroes. Whether there were not subtle principles of human nature at work is a question too far-reaching to be followed here.