eager to fill the factories, man the mines, and settle upon Western lands.  In a word the Republicans stood for all those specific measures which favored the enlargement and prosperity of business.  At the same time they resisted government interference with private enterprise.  They did not regulate railway rates, prosecute trusts for forming combinations, or prevent railway companies from giving lower rates to some shippers than to others.  To sum it up, the political theories of the Republican party for three decades after the Civil War were the theories of American business—­prosperous and profitable industries for the owners and “the full dinner pail” for the workmen.  Naturally a large portion of those who flourished under its policies gave their support to it, voted for its candidates, and subscribed to its campaign funds.

=Sources of Republican Strength in the North.=—­The Republican party was in fact a political organization of singular power.  It originated in a wave of moral enthusiasm, having attracted to itself, if not the abolitionists, certainly all those idealists, like James Russell Lowell and George William Curtis, who had opposed slavery when opposition was neither safe nor popular.  To moral principles it added practical considerations.  Business men had confidence in it.  Workingmen, who longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West.  The immigrant, landing penniless on these shores, as a result of the same beneficent system, often found himself in a little while with an estate as large as many a baronial domain in the Old World.  Under a Republican administration, the union had been saved.  To it the veterans of the war could turn with confidence for those rewards of service which the government could bestow:  pensions surpassing in liberality anything that the world had ever seen.  Under a Republican administration also the great debt had been created in the defense of the union, and to the Republican party every investor in government bonds could look for the full and honorable discharge of the interest and principal.  The spoils system, inaugurated by Jacksonian Democracy, in turn placed all the federal offices in Republican hands, furnishing an army of party workers to be counted on for loyal service in every campaign.

Of all these things Republican leaders made full and vigorous use, sometimes ascribing to the party, in accordance with ancient political usage, merits and achievements not wholly its own.  Particularly was this true in the case of saving the union.  “When in the economy of Providence, this land was to be purged of human slavery ... the Republican party came into power,” ran a declaration in one platform.  “The Republican party suppressed a gigantic rebellion, emancipated four million slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established universal suffrage,” ran another.  As for the aid rendered by the millions of Northern Democrats who stood by the union and the tens of thousands of them who actually fought in the union army, the Republicans in their zeal were inclined to be oblivious.  They repeatedly charged the Democratic party “with being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason.”