which was contending for the maintenance of the Constitution. So clear had the necessity for this attitude become that the Confederate sympathizers, to the number of somewhere near nine tenths of their effective recruits, had already left the State. The first answer which was made to the Confederate invasions was ominous of the issue. By a fourfifths vote it was ordered that the United States flag should be hoisted over the Capitol at Frankfort. On the 18th of September the State formally declared war on the Confederacy, and asked the aid of the Federal authorities in expelling the invaders.

If the sagacious men who had control of Kentucky politics had permitted a swift decision to be made, it is probable that the sympathetic emotions of the Kentucky people would have carried the State into rebellion. As before remarked, the institution of slavery appealed not only to the interests of the pocket, but to the emotions of men as well. It bound all the societies together with a singular consensus. In favoring neutrality the Union men of Kentucky pursued a very wise course, one which, in its measure of forethought, it is difficult to find equaled in history. The final determination of Kentucky came after the emotional stage of the rebellion, when deliberation had done its work. The fact that the course was not dictated by any undue desire to avoid the risks of war is shown by the record of the commonwealth in the subsequent campaigns. Without a draft and without bounties she furnished her quota to the Federal army, and her soldiers did their full share of duty. About 50,000 of her sons fought under the Confederate flag. Out of a white population of less than 950,000 more than 140,000 men faced the perils of war. Counting the home guards who saw service, it is safe to say that one sixth of the whites had an active share in the war. So far as I have been able to ascertain, in no

modern war has so large a portion of a population amounting to about a million of .souls volunteered for military duty.

In the months between the fall of Fort Sumter and the end of Kentucky neutrality the people of the commonwealth had time to do a good deal of thinking. It is doubtful, indeed, if ever a community was so subjected to arduous political thought. The peculiarity of this period, which is most interesting to the observer, is found in the singular individuality which the men displayed in their determinations. It might have been expected that the division of sentiment would have been defined by local or family ties, as has been the case in the history of most internecine strife. Here, however, we find that the divisions were made on purely individual grounds. I do not know of a single large family in the State where all the men were arrayed on one side, and only in the mountain counties of the eastern section, where slavery was unknown, was there anything like unanimity of sentiment in local communities.

Nothing else in our history so well shows the intellectual independence of our people, or their political capacity, if time be given them, to deal with important questions without undue influence from the emotions, as the parting of the Kentuckians in this period of trial. The gravity with which they viewed the situation and the dignity with which they dealt with it are shown by the absence of indecent strife among the men who went into the opposed armies. During the period of neutrality, and for some months thereafter, the highways were full of small parties of recruits hastening to the camps of the Federal or Confederate forces. These bands often met, but I know of no case in which they fell to fighting. On both sides there was a desire to free the inevitable struggle from idle brutality, and to spare their beloved ground from the curse of internecine war. In the subsequent campaigns.

there was very little unnecessary partisan combat, and where, as was often the case, the sons of the commonwealth encountered each other on their native heath, a singularly persistent and successful effort was made to mitigate the horrors of war. Few houses were pillaged, women were respected, the wounded were tenderly cared for; it is indeed doubtful if ever war was waged in so merciful a manner. All this merciful spirit was, in my opinion, due mainly to the time for thought and for deliberate action which was afforded by the period of neutrality, and enforced by the state of mind which led men to insist upon that pause. If two or three other Southern States could have been induced to approach the problems of secession in the same considerate way, the Southern Confederacy would have been impossible, and we might have dealt with the question of slavery by the methods of the statesman rather than by those of the soldier.

The nature of the considerations which led the people of Kentucky, by an overwhelming majority, finally to cast in their lot with the North has been scantily recorded. These considerations have, indeed, to a great extent, been forgotten by those who held them. I judge this by my individual experience. But for the recent discovery of some old letters I could not have recalled the steps which led me to the Federal side in the conflict. These show that during the winter of 1860-61 my sympathies were altogether with the South, and that they were very little affected by reason. Then came the disgust due to the unseemly moblike action of the seceding States, and the conviction that the North was right in making war for the preservation of the Union. In common with most of the people whom I knew, I held to the doctrine that a State had a right to secede whenever it was subjected to inevitable and unendurable ills. In a way, I was then, as I have ever since been, a believer in States' rights, and regarded, the

preservation of our local commonwealths as a condition precedent to any satisfac tory system of general government. It was interesting to me to find in the above-mentioned letters that the argument which in the end determined my allegiance was this: The apparent and probably true ideal of the Southern people was the maintenance of States' rights. With this desire I was in sympathy; but, granting that the South should win its independence, it was evident that the Northern and the Southern States would be driven by their permanent hostility to each other to change from the type of federal Union to that of consolidated governments. In this alteration all chance of local autonomy would disappear, probably never to exist again on this continent. Moreover, I saw plainly, as did every other rational person of my acquaintance, that the strife concerning slavery would afford a perennial source of war-breeding trouble between the North and the South.

The foregoing personal experiences afford a faint reflection of the motives which actuated men of the border when they had to determine the most momentous questions with which the citizen has to deal. It is probable that something like the same line of argument was elaborated by every intelligent man in the border land. It will be safe for the historian of these days to assume that every one of these people felt at once a loving respect for the federal Union and a keen sympathy with his Southern kindred. Where the sympathetic motive was quick and enduring, or where action was hasty, the people who were moved by it almost inevitably were led to join the South. Where the rational element was relatively strong, and particularly where it found room to act, they were in most cases led towards the Union side. There were, of course, men who were drawn both ways, and who never succeeded in bringing themselves to a determination to act with

either side. In the homely but expressive phrase, they remained "on the fence." I know of some exceedingly well-balanced persons who have abided in that uncomfortable position to the present day.

It may be said, however, in praise of the moral efficiency of our Border State people that not one in a hundred of the intellectually competent failed to come to a state of mind in which they could act decisively, or at least share in spirit in the fortunes of one or the other side in the great argument. It might have been expected that many would withdraw from the strife, seeking refuge in foreign countries. I am glad to say that I never personally knew one of these absentees, nor did I ever hear it suggested that such a course of conduct deserved consideration. Even the aged and other non-combatants stayed upon the ground. It was hard indeed to move them from the battlefield, so intense was their desire to have some share in the action. If they could not fight, they could succor the wounded, or cheer on the side to which they owed allegiance.

In reviewing the actions of the Border State men, I have chosen to limit my statements as to details to the people of Kentucky; for there alone, as I have al ready remarked, did I have an intimate personal knowledge with the thoughts and actions of men. There can be no doubt, however, that the intermixture of motives which I have endeavored to delineate existed in other parts of the border. The conditions in Missouri were certainly essentially the same as those among the citizens of my native commonwealth. In Virginia, owing to the swiftness with which that State was precipitated into rebellion, the status was somewhat different. When the State went to the South, all of her sons, com

mitted as they were in mind to some form of the States' rights theory, were impelled to act against the Federal cause. If the "Mother of States and unpolluted men" could have taken the course of Kentucky, there is reason to believe that in the end she would have proved as firm a supporter of the Constitution. As it was, the people acted from their emotions, and reason had no chance to assert its juster sway. Even though the element of fidelity to the State had been thrown into the scales, many Virginians, many indeed of the gentry, adhered to the Union and gave it support of inestimable value. I have known a number of these Unionists of the Old Dominion, and it seems clear to me that, as a class, they were cool-headed, deliberating persons, of a nature which is not readily swayed by the emotions. In a certain rude way, the proportion of these Unionists in Virginia, as compared with the number in Kentucky, shows the weight. which fidelity to the State had in the minds of the Southern people.

The time is approaching when the philosophical historians may profitably begin their accounts of our great revolution. We may be sure that they will find the questions which are connected with the action of the Border State people among the more instructive though difficult problems with which they have to deal. The greater part of those who had any share in the events have passed away. Of the few who remain, only here and there can we hope to find men who, from memory or from record, are able to set forth the story of their thought. These considerations may, I trust, justify me in the eyes of the reader for giving much of my individual experience in the foregoing pages. Were it not for the value which such personal records have, these trifling personalities would be impertinent.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler.

THE simple conception of a political party is of a union of men holding common political principles and seeking common political ends. As an organization, and not a mob, it must have not only leaders, but rules of action and a definite policy. In its most elemental constitution, party life in a free state clusters about the two opposite poles of conservatism and radicalism. In the highly organized community of the United States, with its balance of union and parts, the tendency always has been to centrifugal and centripetal political forces.

In point of fact, our parties are as complex as the ingenuity of man can devise, and must be considered less as instruments than as results. The political sense has been more keenly developed in the United States than anywhere else. Practiced as it has been, in rudimentary forms before the formation of the Union, and since in the multiform expression of federal, state, municipal, and oppidan elections, and in the exercise of an enormous variety of governmental functions, it is no wonder that the political sense of the people is almost a second nature. Moreover, it is not in the field of the state alone that this political sense has been cultivated. It should never be forgotten that the expression of the popular will has at the same time found exercise in the field of the church, and that there has been in this organization, too, the constant practice of the power of choice, as well as, in a minor way, the exercise of governmental functions.

With this cultivation of the political sense there has been also the high development of the organizing power. This has had its stimulus in the freedom of conditions under which men have worked, in the absence in the earlier days of large

vested interests, and, above all, in the presence of the political sense itself, which is conscious of power, and not in the habit of looking higher than itself for the source of power. The people, thrown on their own resources largely in colonial days and in the early days of the republic, acquired the habit of relying on themselves for much that in older countries proceeds from the governing class. The most signal instance of this is in the system of public education, in which the state has been scarcely more than the convenient agency for the people acting with the least restriction of freedom in the organization of schools. The voluntary action which finds expression in all the forms of religious life is another notable illustration of the activity and ease of the people in forming combinations.

In the pathology of politics, it may be said that the most morbid exercise of the political sense is in the tinkering of constitutions, and the inability to distinguish between the law as a register of the enlightened will of the people and the law as an instrument to accomplish reforms. In an analysis of the organizing power when exercised in the political field, the construction of the convention, with its discipline, its severity of rule, its assumption of authority, may be regarded as the most complete product. Here the political sense and the faculty for organization meet to produce the most thorough-going result.

Now, given a vigorous controlling idea, a political party with its Frankenstein of a convention becomes a tremendous force, and this controlling idea is not always to be read in the official declarations of the party. A reader ignorant of history might fancy, from the platform of the Republican party as set forth in 1860, that its members had a

variety of principles under which it was demanding the government. In reality it was because the free thinking of its members had been fused into a single controlling purpose—namely, to check the advance of slavery that the party forced its way against the divided opposition. The Democratic party, in like manner, though scarcely ready for the conflict, went into the field four years ago inspired for whatever success it could achieve by the controlling idea of tariff reform as formulated by its aggressive leader.

Yet these controlling ideas rarely have a dominating power in a party, and the reason lies, not in the decay of moral sense in the people, as sometimes averred, but in the gradual substitution of the notion of a party as containing a life of its own for the notion of a party as an exponent of ideas. A party gathers to itself traditions, associations, a history; it is the immediate creation of the political sense acting along the lines of organization, and it comes to stand for an independent entity, although it may in reality be nothing more than a Feathertop. The more complete its apparatus, the more do those whose own existence is involved in it insist on regarding it, and compelling others to regard it, as self-centred, something to be perpetuated, and hence to be guarded against too rough handling by its creators. There is a slight analogy to be found in the attitude of men toward the party and that taken toward the Constitution. The Constitution was designedly an instrument, and in the early process was regarded by those who made it as somewhat imperfect instrument, so that the first thing to be done with it was to make amendments to it. But the time came when the Constitution was held up by the men who denied its spirit as a sacred object to be interposed as a barrier against the incursion of a healthy moral force. To-day allegiance to party is made a test of political virtue.

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The substitution of self-perpetuation for the accomplishment of an explicit political purpose as the spring of party life has led from time to time to revolt from the great parties, and the formation of minor parties having eager hopes of securing through politics certain specific results. The Prohibition party has been the longest-lived, because it has been dominated by a moral idea, but its strength has always been local; it has failed to have national significance, because the problem with which it is concerped comes within the scope of state, and not federal legislation. Its real contribution to our political history has been in its witness to the power which lies in moral ideas when active in politics; but it has also illustrated the tendency, already noticed, to confuse the distinction which exists between the law as a register of the enlightened will of the people and the law as an instrument to accomplish reforms.

Meanwhile, there has been coming into existence, through the native polit ical sense of the people and the faculty for organization, an instrument of power in public affairs, independent of party, and for the most part sedulously free from complication with party. This power, whatever its specific title, may be called by the name most naturally assumed by it, the League. It is, in brief, a return, for definite political purposes, to the simpler conception of the party as of a union of men holding common principles and seeking common ends. It expresses the healthy reaction of the higher political sense of the people, which has come to regard party as a perfect machine for self-perpetuation, but a very imperfect mode for securing an advance in free institutions.

The example of the American Copyright League may first be cited. Here was an organization planned for the accomplishment of a specific reform. Neither of the great parties could be relied upon to carry out its design. Indeed,