Democrats took this alliance much more innocently than the older Republican leaders.  They insisted, as we have seen, on a declaration of war against Great Britain; and humiliating as were the results of that war, this vigorous assertion of the national point of view, both exposed in clear relief the sectional disloyalty of the Federalists of New England and resulted later in an attempted revival of a national constructive policy.  It is true that the regeneration of the Hamiltonian spirit belongs rather to the history of the Whigs than to the history of the Democrats.  It is true, also, that the attempted revival at once brought out the inadequacy of the pioneer’s conceptions both of the national and the democratic ideas.  Nevertheless, it was their assertion of the national interest against a foreign enemy which provoked its renewed vitality in relation to our domestic affairs.  Whatever the alliance between nationality and democracy, represented by the pioneers, lacked in fruitful understanding of the correlative ideas, at least it was solid alliance.  The Western Democrats were suspicious of any increase of the national organization in power and scope, but they were even more determined that it should be neither shattered nor vitally injured.  Although they were unable to grasp the meaning of their own convictions, the Federal Union really meant to them something more than an indissoluble legal contract.  It was rooted in their life.  It was one of those things for which they were willing to fight; and their readiness to fight for the national idea was the great salutary fact.  Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality.  It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.

Be it immediately remarked, however, that the pioneer Democrats were obliged to fight for the Union, just because they were not interested in its progressive consummation.  They willed at one and the same time that the Union should be preserved, but that it should not be increased and strengthened.  They were national in feeling, but local and individualistic in their ideas; and these limited ideas were associated with a false and inadequate conception of democracy.  Jefferson had taught them to believe that any increase of the national organization was inimical to democracy.  The limitations of their own economic and social experience and of their practical needs confirmed them in this belief.  Their manner of life made them at once thoroughly loyal and extremely insubordinate.  They combined the sincerest patriotism with an energetic and selfish individualism; and they failed wholly to realize any discrepancy between these two dominant elements in their life.  They were to love their country, but they were to work for themselves; and nothing wrong could happen to their country, provided