The Declaration of Independence was not a very candid State paper, and the popularity Jefferson afterwards created for its sentiments was not wholly free from humbug.  Many men were more ready to think themselves the equals of Washington or Hamilton in the respects in which they were not so, than to think a negro their own equal in the respects in which he was.  The boundless space and untrammelled conditions of the new world made liberty and equality in some directions highly attainable ideals, so much so that they seemed to demand little effort or discipline.  The patriotic orators under whom Lincoln sat in his youth would ascribe to the political wisdom of their great democracy what was really the result of geography.  They would regard the extent of forest and prairie as creditable to themselves, just as some few Englishmen have regarded our location upon an island.

This does not, however, do away with the value of that tradition of the new world which in its purest and sincerest form became part and parcel of Lincoln’s mind.  Jefferson was a great American patriot.  In his case insistence on the rights of the several States sprang from no half-hearted desire for a great American nation; he regarded these provincial organisations as machinery by which government and the people could be brought nearer together; and he contributed that which was most needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life.  He imparted to the very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted to its material conditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt presence of a wholesome national ideal.  The patriotism of an older country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs no definite formula.  The man who did more than any other to supply this lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness—­even its national cant—­with high aspiration, did—­it may well be—­more than any strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which should thereafter seem worth preserving.

4. The Missouri Compromise.

No sober critic, applying to the American statesmen of the first generation the standards which he would apply to their English contemporaries, can blame them in the least because they framed their Constitution as best they could and were not deterred by the scruples which they felt about slavery from effecting a Union between States which, on all other grounds except their latent difference upon slavery, seemed meant to be one.  But many of these men had set their hands in the Declaration of Independence to the most unqualified claim of liberty and equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen years’ grace to “that most detestable sum of all villainies,” as Wesley called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped