Over here, in spite of the hideous contradiction of slavery, which ate like a black ulcer into a part of our body politic, the Democratic ideal not only prevailed, but came to be taken for granted as a heaven-revealed truth, which only fools would question or dispute. In Europe, the monarchs of the Old Regime made a desperate rally and put down Napoleon, thinking that by smashing him they would smash also the tremendous Democratic forces by which he had gained his supremacy. They put back, so far as they could, the old feudal bases of privilege and of more or less disguised tyranny. The Restoration could not slumber quietly, for the forces of the Revolution burst out from time to time. They wished to realize the liberty of which they had had a glimpse in 1789 and which the Old Regime had snatched away from them. The Spirit of Nationality now strengthened their efforts for independence and liberty and another Spirit came stalking after both. This was the Social Revolution, which refusing to be satisfied by a merely political victory boldly preached Internationalism as a higher ideal than Nationalism. Truly, Time still devours all his children, and the hysterical desires bred by half-truths prevent the coming and triumphant reign of Truth. While these various and mutually clashing motives swept Europe along during the first half of the nineteenth century, a different current hurried the United States into the rapids. Should they continue to exist as one Union binding together sections with different interests, or should the Union be dissolved and those sections attempt to lead a separate political existence? Fortunately, for the preservation of the Union, the question of slavery was uppermost in one of the sections. Slavery could not be dismissed as a merely economic question. Many Americans declared that it was primarily a moral issue. And this transformed what the Southern section would gladly have limited to economics into a war for a moral ideal. With the destruction of slavery in the South the preservation of the Union came as a matter of course.