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Updated: May 17, 2025
Happily this was not to be; for at this crisis Henry Clay, the "Compromiser," the "Pacificator," the "Peacemaker," as he was fondly called, came forward with a plan of settlement. To please the North, he proposed, first, that California should be admitted as a free state; second, that the slave trade that is, the buying and selling of slaves should be abolished in the District of Columbia.
Not being in any sense a concession, but only an affirmation of a widely accepted principle, this amendment passed the House easily enough. Yet in his rôle of compromiser, Douglas made much of this vote. These "ought to be accepted as an evidence of a salutary change in public opinion at the North."
The timid compromiser on the one hand, and the advocate of coercive restriction on the other, are equally the victims of a superfluous apprehension. The one fears to use his liberty for the same reason that makes the other fearful of permitting liberty.
The same thing is accomplished by reversing the process and asking such questions as, "Who was the American Fabius"? or "The Great Compromiser"? or the "Sage of Menlo Park"? etc. Questions on the authorship of great documents, the founders of institutions, the organizers of movements, reformers, philosophers, artists, statesmen, generals, accomplish the same purpose.
Clay, inveterate trimmer and compromiser that he was, professed to be for the annexation of Texas, provided it could be accomplished without war with Mexico, which was arrant nonsense, since Mexico had given notice that she would consider annexation an act of war. The result of Clay's attitude, and of a widespread distrust of his policies, was that Polk was elected by a large majority.
It was, however, a swift, vivid sermon a short and a busy one, with a reason for each of its parts, incoherent though the parts were. For Browett was a cynic doubter of his own faith; at once an admirer of Voltaire and a believer in the Established Order of Things; despising a radical and a conservative equally, but, hating more than either, a clumsy compromiser.
The compromiser who blinds himself to all those points, and acts just as if the truth were not in him, does for ideas with which he agrees, the very thing which the acute persecutor does for ideas which he dislikes he extinguishes beginnings and kills the germs.
The three are disagreeable, but the trio is transitional in type. Each girl is a compromiser, Undine being the boldest; she did a lot of shifting and indulged in much cowardly evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster. Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three.
Never acknowledge to an Englishman that you think well of him. He'll think little of you if you do. Tell him he's a fool, that he's muddle-headed, that he's a tyrant, that he's a materialist and a compromiser and a hypocrite, and he'll pay you well for saying it. But if you tell the truth and say he's the decent fellow he is, he'll land you in the workhouse!..."
By giving full credit to the semi-democratic and semi-capitalistic reform parties for certain measures, they would go as far as he does in the direction of conciliation and common sense in politics; by denying the possibility of the slightest coöperation with non-Socialists on other and still more important questions, they could constantly intensify the political conflict, and since Jaurès is a perpetual compromiser, put him in the minority in every contested vote within the party.
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