he spirit that gave them life and validity, who
could see nothing nobler in the tenure of high office than the means it
seemed to offer of prolonging it, who knows no art to conjure the spirit
of anarchy he has evoked but the shifts and evasions of a second-rate
attorney, and who has contrived to involve his country in the confusion
of principle and vacillation of judgment which have left him without
a party and without a friend,--for such a man we have no feeling but
contemptuous reprobation. Pan-urge in danger of shipwreck is but a
faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor
fellow's craven abjuration of his "_former_ friend," Friar John, is
magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment
of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times
when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as
effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey.

The question, whether we are a Government or an Indian Council, we do
not propose to discuss here; whether there be a right of secession
tempered by a right of coercion, like a despotism by assassination, and
whether it be expedient to put the latter in practice, we shall
not consider: for it is not always the part of wisdom to attempt a
settlement of what the progress of events will soon settle for us. Mr.
Buchanan seems to have no opinion, or, if he has one, it is a halting
between two, a bat-like cross of sparrow and mouse that gives timidity
its choice between flight and skulking. Nothing shocks our sense of the
fitness of things more than a fine occasion to which the man is wanting.
Fate gets her hook ready, but the eye is not there to clinch with it,
and so all goes at loose ends. Mr. Buchanan had one more chance offered
him of showing himself a common-place man, and he has done it full
justice. Even if they could have done nothing for the country, a few
manly sentences might have made a pleasing exception in his political
history, and rescued for him the fag-end of a reputation.

Mr. Buchanan, by his training in a system of politics without a parallel
for intrigue, personality, and partisanship, would have unfitted himself
for taking a statesmanlike view of anything, even if he had ever been
capable of it. His nature has been subdued to what it worked in. We
could not have expected from him a Message around which the spirit, the
intelligence, and the character of the country would have rallied.