tter charging the
President with "ridiculous pomp, idle parade, and selfish avarice." He
was found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to four months' imprisonment
and a fine of one thousand dollars. There was Cooper, an Englishman,
who fared equally ill for saying or writing that the President did not
possess sufficient capacity to fulfil the duties of his office. What
should we think of the sanity of James Buchanan, should he prosecute
and obtain a conviction against some Black-Republican Luther Baldwin of
1859, for wishing that the wad of a cannon, fired in his honor, might
strike an unmentionable part of his august person? What should we say,
if Horace Greeley were to be arrested on a warrant issued by the Supreme
Court of New York for a libel on Louis Napoleon, as was William Cobbett
by Judge McKean of Pennsylvania for a libel on the King of Spain?

Fiercer and more bitter waxed party-discord, and both sides did ample
injustice to one another. Mr. Jefferson wrote, that men who had been
intimate all their lives would cross the street and look the other way,
lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. And Gouverneur Morris
gives us a capital idea of the state of feeling when he says that a
looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a
dinner when the rest of the company were drunk. Civil war was often
talked of, and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical
staple of the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be
used there in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men
of large means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely
made by both divisions of the Union. Had we been of French or
Spanish descent, there would have been barricades, _coup-d'etats,
pronunciamentos_; but the English race know better how to treat the
body-politic. They never apply the knife except for the most desperate
operations. But where hard words were so plenty, blows could not fail.
Duels were frequent, cudgellings not uncommon,--although as yet the
Senate-Chamber had not been selected as the fittest scene for the use
of the bludgeon. It is true that molasses-and-water was the beverage
allowed by Congress in those simple times, and that charged to
stationery.

What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling
names,--particularly the gentlemen of the press! If they had been
natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which
Pantagruel and Panurg