THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 was the valiant last effort of the Webster-
Clay generation to avoid disunion. It seemed to succeed. Threats of seces-
sion seemed to be overwhelmed by a renewed national goodwill. The
Compromise was celebrated throughout the land as a glorious victory:
yet within a few years it broke, and shortly thereafter the Union also
broke. The divisive forces which are active in any large, rambling federal
structure had triumphed over the forces making for prudence and conces-
sion. The party system had temporarily failed.

In seeking the reasons for failure ¹ we should remember that the United
States had never known a time of rest, of calm self-possession. Whenever
the young nation seemed about to reach an equilibrium of forces, the cir-
cumstances shifted and the balance was again upset. From the day of her
birth America lived among storms which she could neither control nor
dodge. The storms of Napoleon coincided with her childhood, and were
succeeded by the storms of the Industrial Revolution. Uneasy and in-
secure as the world may always have been, the United States surely faced
uncommon troubles when she sought to found her new political and social
institutions at a time when the conditions of life were changing more
radically in a single generation than they had previously changed in a
thousand years. Throughout the Western world for several decades each
new invention brought a confused swirl of blessings and woes, until life
lost whatever stability it had known. And if this was true even in Europe,
the ferment must have been at its greatest in America, where the all-
changing magic of the new technology was revealed during a period of
wide westward expansion and of heavy immigration. The United States,
for example, had by no means digested or even explored the whole of the
Louisiana Purchase when the empire of Texas was added to the Union,
and then Oregon, and the vast booty of Mexico. At once, gold in Cali-
fornia, and discontent in Europe following the outbreaks of 1848, in-
creased the torrents of new settlers. During the eighteen-forties the coun-
try received 1,713,251 immigrants; during the fifties 2,598,214.

This , was exciting and inspiring, but it did not make for case or political
rest. Meanwhile the spoils of Mexico, as Emerson and Calhoun predicted,
came close to poisoning the land-for with every new push toward the

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