Now if the centralizing and decentralizing character of the two parties is borne in mind, their further development down to the present day can be understood. This development seems disconnected and contradictory only when the slavery question is thought to be the main feature and the Republicans are accounted the champions of freedom and the Democrats of slavery. Even Bryce, who has furnished by far the best account of the American party system, underestimates somewhat the inner continuity of the parties. Even he believes that the chief mission of the Republican party has been to do away with slavery and to reconstruct the Southern states, and that since this end was accomplished as far back as in the seventies, new parties ought naturally to have been formed by this time. Although the old organizations have in fact persisted, a certain vagueness and lack of vitality can be detected, he says, in both parties. According to that conception, however, it would be incomprehensible why those who formerly went forth to put an end to slavery now advance to bring the Filipinos into subjection, and to detain the poor man from purchasing his necessities where they are the cheapest.
As we have seen, the Democrats were the party which was true to the Jeffersonian principles, and in opposition to the supporters of congressional authority defended the rights and free play of the individual states. And the Republicans were those who wished to exalt beyond any other the authority of the Federal Government. This is the key to everything which has since come to pass. At the last presidential elections there were three great party issues—the tariff, the currency, and the question of expansion. In deciding on all three of these points, the parties have conformed to their old principles. Free-trade versus protective tariff was not a new bone of contention. Jefferson’s party had urged free-trade with all the nations of the earth at the very beginning of the century, and, of course, a decentralizing party which likes as little supervision and paternalism as possible, will always concede to the individual his right to buy what he requires where it will cost the least. The Democrats did not oppose a tariff for revenue, to help defray the public expenses, but they objected on principle to that further tariff which was laid on goods in order to keep the prices of them high and so to protect home industries. The centralists, that is, the whigs or the Republicans, on the contrary, by their supreme confidence in the one national government, had early been led to expect from it a certain protection of the national market and some regulation of the economic struggle for existence. And protective tariff was one of the main planks in their platform early in the century.