o seal the recognition of
their country as an equal sister in the family of nations, with
Buchanan, and Soule, and Mason, convened at Ostend to plot the larceny
of Cuba! Sages and lawgivers, consulting for the welfare of a world
and a race, on the one hand, and buccaneers conspiring for the pillage
of a sugar-island on the other!

What men, too, did not Washington and Adams call around them in the
Cabinet!--how representative of great ideas! how historical! how
immortal! How many of our readers can name the names of their
successors of the present day? Inflated obscurities, bloated
insignificances, who knows or cares whence they came or what they are?
We know whose bidding they were appointed to obey, and what manner of
work they are ready to perform. And shall we dare extend our profane
comparisons even higher than the Cabinet? Shall we bring the shadowy
majesty of Washington's august idea alongside the microscopic
realities of to-day? Let us be more merciful, and take our departure
from the middle term between the Old and the New, occupied by Andrew
Jackson, whose iron will and doggedness of purpose give definite
character, if not awful dignity, to his image. In his time, the Slave
Power, though always the secret spring which set events in motion,
began to let its workings be seen more openly than ever before. And
from his time forward, what a graduated line of still diminishing
shadows have glided successively through the portals of the White
House! From Van Buren to Tyler, from Tyler to Polk, from Polk to
Fillmore, from Fillmore to Pierce! "Fine by degrees and beautifully
less," until it at last reached the vanishing point!

The baleful influence thus ever shed by Slavery on our national
history and our public men has not yet spent its malignant forces. It
has, indeed, reached a height which a few years ago it was thought the
wildest fanaticism to predict; but its fatal power will not be stayed
in the mid-sweep of its career. The Ordinance of 1787 torn to shreds
and scattered to the winds,--the line drawn in 1820, which the
slaveholders plighted their faith Slavery should never overstep,
insolently as well as infamously obliterated,--Slavery presiding in
the Cabinet, seated on the Supreme Bench, absolute in the halls of
Congress,--no man can say what shape its next aggression may not take
to itself. A direct attack on the freedom of the press and the liberty
of speech at the North, where alone either exists, were