serve the name) largely prevalent in the North, of sending
to the lower house of Congress the men who needed rather than those who
ought to go there,--men without the responsibility or the independence
which only established reputation, social position, long converse with
great questions, or native strength of character can give,--and to the
habit of looking on a seat in the national legislature more as the
reward for partisan activity than as imposing a service of the highest
nature, so that representatives were changed as often as there were new
political debts to pay or cliques to be conciliated,--owing to these
things, the South maintained an easy superiority at Washington, and
learned to measure the Free States by men who represented their
weakest, and sometimes their least honorable, characteristics. We doubt
if the Slave States have sent many men to the Capitol who could be
bought, while it is notorious that from the north of Mason and Dixon's
line many an M.C. has cleared, like a ship, for Washington and a
market. Southern politicians judge the North by men without courage and
without principle, who would consent to any measure if it could be
becomingly draped in generalities, or if they could evade the pillory
of the yeas and nays. The increasing drain of forensic ability toward
the large cities, with the mistaken theory that residence in the
district was a necessary qualification in candidates, tended still more
to bring down the average of Northern representation. The "claims" of a
section of the State, or even part of a district, have been allowed to
have weight, as if square miles or acres were to be weighed against
capacity and experience. We attached too little importance to the
social prestige which the South acquired and maintained at the seat of
government, forgetting the necessary influence it would exert upon the
independence of many of our own members. These in turn brought home the
new impressions they had acquired, till the fallacy gradually became
conviction of a general superiority in the South, though it had only so
much truth in it as this, that the people of that section sent their
men of character and position to Washington, and kept them there till
every year of experience added an efficiency which more than made up
for their numerical inferiority. Meanwhile, our thinking men allowed,
whether from timidity or contempt, certain demagogic fallacies to
become axioms by dint of repetition, chief