follow, public opinion. They hang upon the
applause of the rabble, and succeed or fail in their efforts to
administer the affairs of Government in proportion as they interpret
the wishes of the rabble. Not alone do parties defer to the wishes of
the illiterate, the "great unwashed" majority, but individuals as
well, who prefer to ride upon the wave of success as the champions of
great wrongs rather than to go into retirement as the champions of
just principles. The voice of the Charmer is all too powerful to be
successfully resisted.

Republics have always been fruitful of demagogues. Such vermin find
the soil of democratic government the most fertile and congenial for
their operations, because the audiences to which they speak, the
passions to which they appeal, are not always of the most reflective,
humane or enlightened. Demagogues are the parasites of republics; and
that our country is afflicted with an abnormal number of them is to be
expected from the tentative nature of our institutions, the extent of
our territory and the heterogeneity of our vast population.

Under our government all the peoples of the world find shelter and
protection--save the African (who was formerly used as a beast of
burden and now as a football, to be kicked by one faction and kicked
back by the other) and the industrious Chinaman, who was barred out by
the over-obsequiousness of the Congress of the nation, in deference to
the Sand-Lot demagogues of the Pacific coast, headed by Denis Kearney,
because it was desirable to conciliate their votes, even at the
expense of consistency and the unity of the Constitution. That great
document, while constantly affirmed to be the most broad and liberal
compact ever devised for the governance of man, has always been found
to be narrow enough to serve the purposes of the slave oligarch and
the make-shifts of the party in power; and has always afforded ample
shelter and protection to the lazzaroni of Italy, the paupers of
Ireland, and the incendiary spirits of other countries, but yet cannot
shield a black man, a citizen and to the manor born, in any common,
civil or political right which usually attaches to citizenship.

A putative citizen of the United States commits murder in the
jurisdiction of a friendly power, and the Chief Executive of fifty
millions of people deems it incumbent upon him as the head of the
faction to which he belongs to "call the attention of Congress" to the
fact, ostensibl