in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became
a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil
that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be
tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far
characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the
duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness
of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular
election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general
persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone
conclusion.

In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and
therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For though during
its term of office the government be practically as independent of the
popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are
called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility; then for the first time he becomes capable of
that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the
narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each
other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.

How very far practice is from any likeness to theory, a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government
itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club,
with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are
commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed,
without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas) our
politics become personal and narrow to a degree never parall