Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/686

 654 Review of the period. [i 865-85 had just been beaten by a comparatively unknown man. In the place of these a new race of leaders had come up, in whom the passions of the Civil War did not burn as in those who had fought the fight through a cooler tempered race, less masterful, and inclined to rely on business methods rather than on the iron hand. Among the voters, too, the veterans were now outnumbered by hundreds of thousands who did not come to manhood until after 1871, and by masses of foreign-born immigrants. This new electorate had settled into the mechanism of the old parties, but it was held together by no such ties as those that bound the older Democrats and Republicans. In the South, of course, the case was different. There the Reconstruction period had left in- effaceable traces in the permanent incorporation of the race question in society and politics; but outside the South the times were ripe for a change ; and the new tendencies of the years 1879 to 1885 marked the path which the new developments were to follow. In looking at the Reconstruction period as a whole we find a pro- longed and involved struggle, dramatic at times, but seldom heroic. It lacks the moral intensity of the earlier slavery controversy, or of the war which followed, and takes its tone from a partisan and rather reckless society. We find the unrelenting use of strength without accompanying coolness of judgment, contests of more bitterness than dignity, and, above all, the marks of an attempt to reverse the order of nature. The years 1865-85 display in the United States a parallel to the simul- taneous efforts of liberal reform in Europe. In each continent the solu- tion of problems of national sovereignty, first attempted by the sword, was continued by masterful legislation, the result of the mingled influence of the fading doctrinaire liberalism and of a new materialistic political thought. On both continents the attempt to subvert the rooted habits and beliefs of generations failed; in Europe when in the Cv&turkampf the Catholic Church emerged victorious ; in America when the effort to place the negro on an equality with his former master broke down. With these defeats the last victory of abstract liberalism crumbled ; and the way was cleared for new questions of national growth and international politics, and for new political creeds.