Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FA.RTY METHOD. The first and great argument in favor of the party method is the assertion that a separate party organization was successful in the old contest with slavery. This is more specious than real. The facts do not sustain the assumption. The original abolition party was never successful. It was superseded by the Free Soil party, and that never achieved a victory. It cast a larger vote in 1848 than in 1852. Then came the Know Nothing tornado, which demolished party lines. The anti- slavery sentiment, however, grew steadily in all the parties, till this general disruption in 1853, which prepared the way for the reorganization of parties more directly than ever before on the issues of slavery. The separate party did not succeed. It only intensified the bitterness of the pro-slavery people, and strengthened their hold on the government, and gave them such assured control of the nation as to increase their contempt for the opposition. The third party was lost in the disruption and reorganization. Then came the intervention of Providence, the rebellion, the war, and the slave power was broken by influences which can not be traced to any separate party organization, and certainly not to any thirdparty agency. Hence the analogy is not complete. The precedent does not apply, and therefore the argument is fallacious. It remains that no great reform, involving moral elements of transcendent importance, has been successfully accomplished in this country through the agency of separate political organization. Of course this does not prove that such an achievement will forever remain impossible, but it suggests the necessity of serious inquiry before assuming the practicability of a movement encumbered with such grave difficulties and weighed down with many questionable elements. ...