him. If such a man were the fairest outcome of Democracy, then is it
indeed a wretched failure. But for the factitious importance given to
his name by the necessity of furnishing the President with a pretext
for stumping the West in the interest of Congress, Mr. Douglas would be
wellnigh as utterly forgotten as Cass or Tyler, or Buchanan or
Fillmore; nor should we have alluded to him now but that the recent
pilgrimage has made his name once more public property, and because we
think it a common misfortune when such men are made into saints, though
for any one's advantage but their own. We certainly have no wish to
play the part of _advocatus diaboli_ on such an occasion, even were it
necessary at a canonization where the office of Pontifex Maximus is so
appropriately filled by Mr. Johnson.

In speaking of the late unhappy exposure of the unseemly side of
democratic institutions, we have been far from desirous of insisting on
Mr. Seward's share in it. We endeavored to account for it at first by
supposing that the Secretary of State, seeing into the hands of how
vain and weak a man the reins of administration had fallen, was
willing, by flattering his vanity, to control his weakness for the
public good. But we are forced against our will to give up any such
theory, and to confess that Mr. Seward's nature has been "subdued to
what it works in." We see it with sincere sorrow, and are far from
adding our voice to the popular outcry against a man the long and
honorable services of whose prime we are not willing to forget in the
decline of his abilities and that dry-rot of the mind's nobler temper
which so often results from the possession of power. Long contact with
the meaner qualities of men, to whose infection place and patronage are
so unhappily exposed, could not fail of forcing to a disproportionate
growth any germs of that cynicism always latent in temperaments so
exclusively intellectual and unmitigated by any kindly lenitive of
humor. Timid by nature, the war which he had prophesied, but had not
foreseen, and which invigorated bolder men, unbraced him; and while the
spendthrift verbosity of his despatches was the nightmare of foreign
ministries, his uncertain and temporizing counsels were the perpetual
discouragement of his party at home. More than any minister with whose
official correspondence we are acquainted, he carried the principle of
paper money into diplomacy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn
de Lh