CHAPTER XVIII. WHY THE SOUTH HAS NOT DENOUNCED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY--WHAT KEEPS THE PARTY ALIVE--WHAT THE FINAL END OF THIS REPUBLIC.
|THREE more questions, please, and then I will not trouble you more. What you have already said seems to be true, and yet so new and so strange are these revelations to my ears--stranger than any fiction I ever read in the works of Sir Walter Scott or others--that had you not substantiated each proposition with arguments drawn from antecedent probability, from sign, and from example, I could scarcely have believed them. But three queries yet remain in my mind. Allowing all that you have said to be veritable history, how comes it that the South has not denounced the Democratic party for its perfidy in making promises which it never fulfilled? How comes it that, with such a weight of sin upon it, the party can still be kept alive? And, from all your study of history, what deductions do you draw as to the final decline and fall--if such a thing is to be--of this Republic?
Your questions are plain, frank, yet pointed, and I will endeavor to answer each in as plain and frank a manner. First, as to the truth of what we have already said, if the statements and propositions related to any other than a political subject, there would be no more doubt of their truthfulness than of any statement or proposition made by Gibbon, Macaulay, Bancroft, or any other historian. But upon the two subjects of politics and religion, men are generally so set in their opinion that blindness in the one and bigotry in the other seems to be as natural to the human mind "as for grass to be green, or skies to be blue, on bright clear days in June." Nor are such statements ever allowed to go unchallenged, however true they may be, unless the parties have been so long dead and buried that no sympathy remains. What Macaulay says of political parties and of church influences in his _History of England,_ is just as true as any other part of his admirable work, and yet the work had scarcely made its appearance before the most violent epithets were hurled at him because of these. Had Gibbon written his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ten or even five centuries earlier, it would have received most bitter denunciation from all who yet sympathized with the wrongs which Gibbon pointed out, and even so late as the eighteenth century, when his work was first published, it did not escape censure. While Bancroft only wrote of the long, long ago, in his capital History of the United States, nobody questioned his statements or deductions; but as he approached nearer to the present, and had of necessity to say something of the acts and influence of political parties and of churches, he awoke the sleeping demons--blindness and bigotry--and from thenceforth there was more or less growl whenever a new volume appeared. I revive and mention these facts now, only to show you, my friend, that I am not at all surprised at your inquiries; nor shall I be surprised if the last six chapters of this volume, and, because of these, the whole book, are most violently and bitterly denounced by the entire Democratic press of this country, and by every religious and political journal in this country and Europe whose special province it is to uphold foreign religious and political influence. With these as introductory remarks, I will now proceed to answer your inquiries.