lyze the executive arm in all times of
great emergency, to render but half effectual every great national
enterprise, to make wavering the national policy, to exasperate
political parties more and more against each other, thereby dividing the
people and weakening the national life and progress, preventing all
concentration of effort and unanimity of purpose, and--worst of
all--subjecting the country periodically to the violent shock of
opposing systems, according as parties alternate in power, tossing the
ship of state in the brief period of a four years' term from one wave of
theory to another, and opposing one, only to be hurled back as violently
as before. Can it be doubted that such a state of affairs is injurious
to prosperity and either political or social advancement? Were the
results of every Administration for _good_, there would be less danger;
but radical evils cannot but result from the bitter partisanship of the
party in power, and when the scale is reversed and the opposite party
gains the ascendency, the new Administration has scarcely time to
correct the errors of its predecessors and to establish its own theory,
ere the popular tide ebbs and flows again in the opposite direction, the
ins are out and the outs are in, and again the alternation begins.
Certainly party divisions are the life of a republic, from their
tendency to counterbalance each other, and periodically reform abuses,
thus keeping the vessel in the straight course; yet when those divisions
reach the point which we see in our midst to-day, when the avowal of any
principle or theory by the one party, however just or beneficial it may
seem, is but the signal for the uncompromising hostility and bitter
denunciation of the opposition, who seek to make of it a handle to move
the giant lever of political power, unmindful of the wants and the
urgent necessities of the land--a hostility having for its basis the
single fact that the new measures are unfortunately advocated by the
opposite party--then such divisions become not only injurious to the
body politic, but a foul blot upon the civilization of our day and
nation. This is perhaps putting the question in a strong light; but,
admitting that we have not yet reached that point, are we not swiftly
drifting in that direction? Let every candid thinker put the question to
himself and ponder it deeply, remembering, while looking for the
ultimate result, that it was the bitter hostility of opposing fact