at mode
of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it
neither courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging
parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly
number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position,
but have been bullied into it,--men who see clearly enough that both
parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves,
almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations. But
then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of
character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large
thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The
missiles hurled from one side are disorganizer, infidel, disunionist,
despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side,
the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity,
and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student
finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire
of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in
joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being
thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental
independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what
are irreverently styled the "old fogies"; for if Young America goes on
at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy
will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of
pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal
to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, "Am I not a man
and a brother?" But with whatever association, political or moral, the
thinker may connect himself, let him go in,--and not be dragged in or
scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his
race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides,
as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of
literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital
of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs
into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate
in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an
Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and
still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight
t