Thus a long, bloody and costly War of Sections--a fraternal war if ever there was one--brought on by alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of the people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight.

It comes easier and shows clearer.

Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been compromised from time to time and in the end disposed of.

Slave labor even at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy.

The institution untenable, modern thought against it, from the first it was doomed.
But the extremists would not have it.