The Republican Party
lican achievement is the record of the nation's progress.
Mention has been made of various minor parties which have disported themselves in every presidential campaign. There have been many more, the very names of some of which are forgotten. They have run their little course and passed away, like the “Quids” and “Hunkers” and Barn Burners” and “Silver Grays” and others which represented divisions in the major parties rather than separate organizations. The chief record which they have made has been one of vain futility. Free soil was secured and vindicated, but not by the ephemeral Free Soil party. Slavery was abolished, but it was not the Abolition party that did the great work. The Union and the Constitution were preserved, but not through the efforts of the Constitutional Union party. After the stormy passions of the war had passed, liberal principles of reconstruction prevailed, but it was not the Liberal party that enforced them. Prohibition has been enacted, but the Prohibition party has never carried a single national election. As these pages are written, woman suffrage is at the point of final triumph, but the Woman Suffrage party has never seriously figured in an electoral campaign.
The lesson is obvious and, as it was suggested at the beginning as something to be illustrated in this history, so it may be recurred to at the close, as something which every chapter in the record emphasizes. The American government is a government through parties, and through two major parties and them alone. It is thus alone that responsibility can be fixed and stability assured. A multiplicity of parties, no one having a majority, was tried for years in our sister republic of France, with the result of half a dozen changes of
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