Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/260

 236 T. W. Davenport. the Democracy. Republican conventions were in the right direction and therefore rational, but about all they could expect to accomplish was to enlist the waiting, backward Whigs in the movement. As vote-getters by proclamations and addresses, in time to be of service at the election on the Constitution, supposed to be near at hand, they were con- fessedly impotent. The Democracy were still impervious and would continue to be so against any of the devices of the Black Republicans. What was needed at this juncture was just what happened-— an earnest, thoughtful communica- tion Prom one who could not be accused of having any designs on the unity and harmony of the Democratic party. And Judge Williams, being free from entangling complicity with cliques and rings, as well as being the recipient of more general public confidence than any other Democrat, was certainly the right man in the right place. But if the supreme probl<^m at that time was to make Oregon a free State, and surely it was the most momentous crisis in its history, why has the letter been omitted by the historians? One man, in answnr to this query, said: "The Judge's letter was pitched on too low a key to suit the sensitive nerves of Mrs. Victor, who was Bancroft's Oregon historian." Thpre are a good many incidents and conditions that grate upon the nerves of a sensitive historian, but historians must not forget that average human nature, though progressive, is at present pitched on a low key. The great bulk of human motives and human actions are based on that key, and cannot be understood in their causal relations while the key-note is protested. Call altruism the high key and egoism the low key, but either alone is not the key of human nature and never will be. Either alone is abnormal; both combined are essen+ial and interdependent. Our moralists would have had Judge Williams say to his Democratic brethren, "The negro is a brother man and therefore entitled to equal rights with yourselves, and to make a slave of him is a sin and shame." How would that kind of preaching have told at the polls in November? The people of Oregon did not believe in such broad fraternity. A few of them did. Nothwithstanding