ying the District Court-House at
Skreemeropolisville City with revolvers, was led to disparage the
union of these States, it is seized on as proof conclusive that the
party to which he belongs are so many Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is
unanimous only in misspelling the name of that oft-invoked
conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms always in advance,
so that we seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but a
prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in
all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent
for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures
our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if
matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress
to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President
goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch every member of the
Committee. We are kept normally in that most unprofitable of
predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians measure their
words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.

Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of
statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for
opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized
world for patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was
a necessary evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave;
then that it was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it
was a system divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned
under the New. With a representation, three-fifths of it based on the
assumption that negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists
on our acknowledging that they are things. After compelling