These figures pretty well disposed of the claim that the bill was a tender from the North to the South. It was simply a Western and Southern Democratic measure. Taken together with the vote in the Senate, these figures also showed that the Whig party was a party opposed to slavery extension, unanimously so in the North, and in some degree in the South. They revealed that the Whig party in the North was to be merged in a Northern party with the Free-soil element of the Democratic party, and was to be overwhelmed in the South by the union of the proslavery-extension Whigs with the Democrats. They indicated that one sectional party was soon to hold the majority in the North, and another in the South; and gave thus the fearful warning that the North was, at last, to be arrayed against the South upon the subject which was of greater interest to the South, in the minds of the slaveholders, than the Union itself. [Sidenote: The Kansas-Nebraska Act a stupendous fallacy.] From the point of view of the present, we are compelled to regard the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as probably the greatest error which the Congress of the United States ever committed, and the arguments by which it was supported as among the most specious fallacies that have ever misled the minds of men. We must take this ground, unless we assume that we could not have solved the slavery problem in any other way than we did, and at any less cost. If we make this assumption, we may then consider this Act as providential, in {406} that it precipitated a crisis, which was bound to come, and which would only have been made more terrible by delay. While, however, we of the succeeding generation may explain the place of this Act in our history in this way, no considerations of this kind can justify the men who produced it, and placed it upon the statute-book. That God should "make the wrath of man to praise him" does not excuse the wrath of man. {407} CHAPTER XX. THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS