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Catholicism, sustained high tariff rates, voted for subsidies to steamer lines, but he never received personally any pecuniary reward for his services beyond his legal salary. All he derived from the interests he supported was, what he craved more than all things else, political advancement. And it was well said of him, that he was politically the uncleanest politician in the United States, but personally the cleanest. One cause-Knownothingism-he would not serve, though it seemed to be for his interest to do so; "because," as he declared, "it belittled Americanism." Nor did he ever dally with slavery. He understood the bubbling nature of American politics better than anybody else. He was much like Talleyrand-could swear to a dozen Constitutions and carry out none. He knew that politics looked bad when seen in their nudity, and looked upon professions of ideas as the best clothing to cover their nakedness. And he furnished them to his party.

He exacted no ideal friendship from his supporters; what patronage he had, he conferred on them, and expected the same of them. He disliked Chase, because he was ever advocating some principle or some reform measure which Seward did not believe to be sincerely done by him. He thought even less of Douglas, whose personal habits and familiar intercourse with low people, were offensive to him.

The mantle of Hamilton had evidently fallen on Seward's shoulders, but he knew its personal perils too well, so he wore it very little, and only as a Sunday habit. He saw very well, that the time for a Hamilton was as much gone by, as for a Washington or a Jefferson. He had ever vividly before his mind Hamilton's death in the duel with Aaron Burr, but did not think, that it would be possible, that the assassination of Cæsar, the absurdest political tragedy in history, would ever be acted over again in the assassination of Lincoln and the attempts on his own life. When it came, he saw, that American politics were not all bubbles, but that the pages of their history were likely to be as tragic as any. Playing with fire under the hallucination, that it will not burn, because it is done in America, was the characteristic of the public men of the United States between 1848 and 1860. They all missed (every one of those that dealt in firebrands) their great aim-the Presidency; and history will record, that they deserved their disappointment.

JEFFERSON DAVIS

is still alive, and standing in the deep shadow of contemporary hate. His contemporaries are hardly prepared to do justice

to him, but this we will say that Mr. Davis will be to future generations the illustration of an adage directly opposite to that of Solon to Croesus. The great Athenian said: I call no man happy before his death. Another wise man has said, what is more applicable to Davis: "Call no public man a villain, before his death, for contemporary history is seldom just.” Davis is the scapegoat of a lost cause, and bearing not only his own sins, which are many, but also those of his people and of his enemies. He cannot escape the obloquy of having supported the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, but he can offer an excuse for his conduct, which Douglas cannot, to wit: that he was influenced by a principle of devotion to what he believed his people's cause. His speech on leaving the Senate, just as he was going to Mississippi to be the President of the Confederated States, lies before us as we write, and we agree with him in the remark: that it was "a shame to the public authorities in the United States, that the disputes between the North and South could not be settled without war." But was he blameless? Did he, during the preceding controversies, hold that even balance, that justified his being a leader and ruler in the bloody conflict, which grew out of them?

We cannot answer the question in his favor! He used a party, when he should have appealed to the whole country. Thus two sinking causes added only dead weight to each other, and made both sink the faster. The democratic party was declining, because it failed to improve the administration of public business; slavery was sinking, because it used its political power to secure partisan objects. The two could, by coalescing, only deprive themselves of friends and multiply enemies. Both would have been stronger by themselves, than they were united; and the only act in that drama, which history will approve, is the separation of the southerners from the Baltimore Convention in 1860, after the nomination of Douglas. Yancy, the most eloquent man America ever produced, was the leader in that movement, and we shall ever remember his noble, lithe figure as he spoke in 1860 to that assembly. The South and its party were defeated at the polls, but what does that signify; if the act itself had been a regaining of the self-respect, that was so often trailed in the dust by previous partisan conduct? The time for its fair appreciation will come, when it will stand out clear as noonday sun, that the republican party did the very opposite of this, and made the country pay the cost of its ambition. The South might have done the same thing in 1857 by marching troops into, then revolting Massachusetts. It refrained then, under the advice of Davis, from playing the oppressor.

CHAPTER XXXI.

AMERICAN FATALISM.

"The instruments of destruction cannot serve in reconstruction."-St. Simon.

AMONG many old things, which America has revived in a new form, is ancient fatalism. Its specific American character is, that, unlike its antique brother, that believed all things subject to inevitable necessity, it ascribes this only to the peculiar nature and character of the United States. It cannot therefore be called pantheistic, but it is certainly patriotic, in the sense in which this word is usually applied. It is not astrological, for it looks to no particular constellation as the mediating cause of the nation's fate. We might say it is religious, like the Mahometan, in its type, because it has faith in supernatural Providence and its irreversible decrees; but when we examine it closer we find that it believes much less therein, than in popular instincts, and calls both: "manifest destiny." Its general features are often Calvinistic, of the John Knox type, but they are lengthened and sharpened by American fortuities. The phrases: Help yourself! All right! Go ahead! Let's try it anyhow! became gradually national watchwords. No man could be popular, while this feeling preponderated (as it did in 1860), who would urge any particular principle, method, or policy as necessary to public conduct. Neither party would nominate such men, and Jef. Davis, Buchanan, Seward, and Chase were defeated before the respective party conventions on account of their pronounced opinions. The men wanted were persons, who like Lincoln, or his secretary of the interior, Caleb B. Smith, were willing to drift because they believed that

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune."

This fatalism has had a slow but steady growth. It grew, the faster, the more purely Americans became Americans; for the very air they breathed gave it to them, and their peculiar success in most things, strengthened it. The Indian had it in his

stolidity and total lack of economy; in the immigrant it became animated and intensified from the moment of his arrival; the natives took it as an inheritance and intensified it.

It always arises among human beings, who are either prosperous or miserable from causes unknown to them. Its fosterbrothers are indolence, indifference, and repugnance to inquire into causes; either because the population has a lazy mental temper, or because it is half aware that the knowledge that would be worked out by inquiry would not flatter them and perhaps condemn them.

The ken of the true sources of social and political occurrences have lain deeper in America than in other countries, and at the same time the seeming causes were all on the surface. How easy to take appearances for realities, and how difficult to find the realities beneath the appearances! It began with every first settlement. The new-comers could not forget the hard work, the frugality, and the restraints at home; but before them was the fact, that with less work, less economy, and less government they prospered more. Pertness whispered, “It is your smartness that explains the paradox;" Piety ascribed it to "divine blessings;" and Modesty suggested, as a compromise, to call it "fate." It was a compound of divine goodwill and populatory shrewdness. It soon got its verbiages, and we have ever noticed, that just to the degree to which the respective personages had self-enhanced existences, they were not fatalists, while for all beyond it they were such. Those of them, who associated most in church circles, got the habit of using general religious phrases, while those who moved in party proceedings employed political words; and some mixed both promiscuously. Presidents and Governors prefaced or concluded their messages with them, stump-speakers used them for perorations, and all liked to hear and read them, because it gave them words for that for which they had no definite understanding.

This mental disposition discouraged philosophic and scientific research, and the questions: whether "the necessary relations of persons and things" were inherent in nature, or had to be found by juridical acumen, or were ordained by some being standing outside of nature? were much less elucidated in America, than in Europe. Much as to religion and government was accepted from the past. And so it was as to the inquiry: whether morals are evolved by society or revealed supernaturally? The inquiry: whether public authority is a social necessity or instituted by some omnipotence or sovereignty? was also very superficially discussed. In everything, political and religious, there was less scientific progress.

The immigrants always found it more convenient to ascribe to fate his coming as well as his living here, than to reason them out, and neither the Indians nor the resident whites and blacks could give him any better explanations of their presence. They were all fatalities to themselves and to each other. Foresight, industry, economy, manners, government, churches, seemed to be surplusages, and they appeared to be kept up more from habit than reason. Such a population could not appreciate, as fully as less fortunate peoples, the necessity of carrying on public affairs from conscious reason, and to select men most fit to bring it out. And when, in 1860, an objective inquiry into the causes of the impending mischief, was the first and highest duty, it was evaded under various fatalistic casuistries.

The nation kept on voting, voting, voting, but all it accomplished was to express in numbers the aggregate amount of indefinite opinions. Every vote aggravated the difficulty of the hour. There were but more seeds of evil, and more haste towards a harvest of misunderstandings. An outside scapegoat was wanted in every section of the Union. The South found it in abolitionism; the North in slavery; Protestant Church zealots in Catholicism. Neither found it, where it was, within its own society and its own political conduct. Had there been a grain of sense left, they would both have seen, that the very fact, that they looked outside of themselves for the sources of evil, was proof that they did not understand the nature of democracies; for in them, whatever is wrong, must spring from the voting multitude.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

We place him first, because he is the best of the fatalists. He said in the spring of 1861, on parting with his friends: "Pray that I may have that divine assistance and guidance, without which I cannot succeed, and with which I cannot fail." That was the easiest way for him to admit and yet conceal his fatalism. It was casting an anchor to the windward, and resting upon it, the people afterwards said with one accord, in extenuation of the war: "It could not have been avoided, it had to come some time or other, it was God's will, being vox populi." Seward had prepared the public mind for it by the phrase: "irrepressible conflict." Indeed! what else could Lincolnalways the child, and at last the victim of fate-do? except, what the Turks practice when they turn to Mecca, to wit:

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