ches wherewith he can do no good?" Enough
of wearisome talk we have had about "progress," the rights of "the
masses," the "dignity of labor," and "extending the area of freedom"!
"Clear your mind of cant, sir," said Johnson to Boswell; and no better
advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Work
out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your
sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of
your duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, your
hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings?
A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of
human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives
its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on
which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it
disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in
heaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this
subject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against
humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own
shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cutting
severity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, in
justification of her indignant rebuke of her wicked mother:--

"'Tis you that say it, not I
You do the unholy deeds which find rue words."

Yet in that party calling itself democratic we rejoice to recognize true,
generous, and thoroughly sincere men,--lovers of the word of democracy,
and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who
are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy
will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to
prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in
deceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democratic
voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate
slavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of the
matter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by
political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be
useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and
strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already
to see that, under the process whereby men of