on, they came to stand as the leaders in the greatest political movement of our history. The refusal of the Whig Convention of 1848 to adopt an antislavery resolution, and the great acts above mentioned, together with the popular reaction against a party which, if it had had its way, would never have won the grand territories on the Pacific, destroyed the Whig party. The party managers, enraged at the immense foreign element which they saw added year by year to their adversaries, forming a cohort, as it appeared, especially amenable to party discipline and the dictation of party managers, took up the Native American movement, which had had some existence ever since the great tide of immigration set in. The effort was wrecked on the obvious economic follies involved in it. How could a new country set hindrances against the immigration of labor? Politically, the effect was great in confirming the allegiance of naturalized voters, as a mass, to the Democratic party as the party which would protect their political privileges against malicious attacks. The formation of the Free-Soil party or its development into the Republican party, brought the extension of slavery into the territories, and the extension of its influence in the administration of the government, distinctly forward as the controlling political issue.
On this issue the Democratic party, as a political organization, made up traditionally of the southern element which has been described, of so much of the old northern Democratic party as had not been repelled by the recent advances in Southern demands, and of the large body of immigrants who regarded that party as the poor man's and the immigrant's friend, fell out of the place it had occupied as the representative of the great democratic tide which flows through and forms our political history. This movement has been in favor of equality. It has borne down and obliterated all the traditions and prejudices
