I THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION AND ITS PROBLEMS It is important to recognize that the anti-slavery agitation, the secession of the South, and the Civil War were, after all, only an episode in the course of American national development.

The episode was desperately serious.

Like the acute illness of a strong man, it almost killed its victim; and the crisis exposed certain weaknesses in our political organism, in the absence of which the illness would never have become acute.

But the roots of our national vitality were apparently untouched by the disease.

When the crisis was over, the country resumed with astonishing celerity the interrupted process of economic expansion.
The germs of a severe disease, to which the Fathers of the Republic had given a place in the national Constitution, and which had been allowed to flourish, because of the lack of wholesome cohesion in the body politic--this alien growth had been cut out by a drastic surgical operation, and the robust patient soon recovered something like his normal health.