very in its most horrid aspect with officers of the Federal Government dragging a fellowman through the streets in irons, to banish him from liberty and deport him into bondage. As a logical consequence, "the underground railroad" sprang into existence and organized and advertised better facilities than ever for the easy escape of slaves from the South into Canada.

When Clay and Webster sponsored and Fillmore signed that Fugitive Slave Act, the Whig party played its last card in the slavery game. Northern business interests, the mainstay of the Whigs, were faithful allies of the Southern business in slaves. But after the Fugitive Slave Act, those "cotton" Whigs of the North could no longer hold in check the "conscience" Whigs, and the party was split wide open.

This meant that a new party would have to be started. Naturally it would be an anti-slavery party, unless the public mind could be drawn away from the subject. That was easily done by raising a furious outcry against the foreigners. It is a familiar ruse. Whenever any wrong among ourselves is in danger of exposure, the first thing that its votaries are likely to do is to attempt to change the subject by appealing to the primitive prejudice against strangers.

To distract the Northern people from the slavery question, the losing Whig politicians took up with the American or "Knownothing" party. Its passwords, its secret oaths and mummeries and its cowardly mobbings of the laborious, unoffending Irish provided a timely, though happily a brief, diversion from the real question. Fears of the slave power at home were all but lost for a few years in fears of the Pope at Rome.

In the midst of that mad distraction the Missouri Compromise was easily repealed by the politicians of both sections. This left the free soil of the virgin West

wholly unprotected against slavery for the first time since the Ordinance of 1787. The Supreme Court hastened to complete forever the work of destruction by declaring, in its Dred Scott decision, that neither Congress nor the States had power to keep slavery out of any part of the country.

From that judgment of the court of last resort there remained no appeal except to the sword. To that tragic pass the politicians in the White House, in Congress and on the bench-and the people as a whole-had brought the country at last. Politics utterly had failed to solve the problem, and that failure made necessary, made unavoidable a violent solution of it.

The spineless Presidents of that inglorious period were thoroughly representative of their generation, and they have conveniently served as scapegoats. But why blame Tyler and Polk, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan for doing the things they were chosen to do and for leaving undone the things they were chosen to avoid? They are dust. The American people still live. They ought to take their share of the blame as a warning against making the same costly mistake some other time on some other question.

FRANKLIN PIERCE

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NEW ENGLAND'S THIRD PRESIDENT

(1804) Nov. 23, Franklin Pierce born at Hillsboro, N. H.-(1824) Graduated from Bowdoin College.-(1827) Became a lawyer.1829-33) Member of New Hampshire Legislature.-(1833-37) Member of Congress.-(1837-42) United States Senator.-(1842) Resigned. (1847-48) Brigadier-General in the Mexican War. FRANKLIN PIERCE was the second dark horse and the third New Englander to enter the White House. He remained for more than three-score years the last President to be drawn from the six States which occupy the upper right-hand corner of the national map. Even he was chosen not as a representative of New England, but rather as an agent of the South, and New Hampshire debated half a century before it grudgingly set up in the yard of the Capitol at Concord a statue of her only President.

Franklin Pierce, the President, may have few friends; but Frank Pierce, the man, had more friends than most Presidents have been able to boast. One of his fellow-students at Bowdoin College was Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their lifelong friendship bridged the wide gulf between politics and literature. The author of the "Scarlet Letter" wrote Pierce's campaign biography, received from him an appointment as consul at Liverpool, and at last he died in the company of the ex-President, while the two friends were enjoying together a White Mountain vacation.