coherence and harmony of the ideas of its members, or to the probabilities of its future success.

The Democratic party, so completely defeated at the recent election, may disband and cease to exist as at present organized; but those of the persons who compose it, who have opinions and purposes in common, will, if their views as to measures are opposed to those of the Republicans, naturally recombine under another name, and the self-same rose by any other name "will smell as sweet" as before. Nomenclature with parties, except as a trap to catch the unwary, is of little consequence. The principles of government shared in by a body of people, and a general concurrence in the methods of legislation and administration by which these principles are to be applied to affairs, and the fundamental and coherent forces that cause political parties, other than associations of mere spoilsmen, to come into being and to endure, are the determinate causes of party existence. Whether it is the cohesive force of a genuine love of liberty and justice protected and administered by law, or "the cohesive power of public plunder," it is, in either case, the community of opinion and of design that is the plain bond of party existence.

Wherever there is a government in which the people are the source and primary administrators of political power, political parties must and ought to exist so long as there is any difference of opinion in the state either as to the principles upon which, or the methods by which, the government ought to be carried on.

The manifest and just objects of a party in a free state are not only the concentration of the voting force of all who think alike upon a single candidate for office, but essentially the free discussion of the points of difference with its adversaries, in order that conclusions may be fairly formed from a view of both sides, and made effective by the largest possible preponderance of voices in the election. All this is too evident for extended discussion, although recent experience in many parts of the United States seems to show a state of things practically quite different from this theory. It is evident that any party which prevents, or in any manner discourages, the free and peaceful discussion of public questions by its adversaries, or which abets or tolerates any interference with free and lawful voting and the true and honest returning of the votes, is hostile to free institutions. If such a party happened (as has generally been the case even in the worst of parties) to contain some really patriotic

members, they would naturally leave it and unite with their former adversaries to overthrow it; for, although they might not agree with them in a single point of business polity, yet the preservation of the liberty of discussion and political action being essential to the very existence of a free government, questions of commerce, or of revenue, or of currency would cease, for the time, to be important compared with the paramount duty of preserving the vital principles of the government, upon which all honest parties must depend. The patriot does not hesitate to reject a tariff or free trade if he is to win it at the expense of stifling a single voice of opposition, or at the price of the false return of a single vote. If he cannot have the chief magistrate he prefers, unless the agents or associates of his party purchase some of the electors chosen by the States, or forge and put forth letters and documents which, if true, show the candidate of the other party to be unworthy of public trust, he does not hesitate to adopt the advice of Plato to the members of his republic, to "choose everywhere and at all times the best of what is possible," and he votes cheerfully with the other party.

If, in a less urgent crisis, the honest partisan finds that the ruling majority of the party he has acted with intends to resort to measures he thinks injurious to the industries of his fellowcitizens, or to the commerce or trade of his country, he proves that the best partisan is he who is independent of party coercion, and places the weight of his influence along with those, by whatever name they may be called, whose measures he has found to be in these respects wholesome.

In the formation and career of parties, chieftainship exercises a large influence, not only as assisting to form just and prudent policies and measures, and, by superior reasons stated with mighty eloquence, bringing majorities of intelligent citizens to unite in their support, but, independently of such broad considerations, from circumstances of personal station and influence derived either from traditional family power and position, transcendent service to the country in war, and long and faithful service in harmony with the views and efforts of some association of his fellow-men, or from the audacious determination to lead and control, from the single and selfish motive of being at the head and reaping the personal benefits supposed to flow from such a station. The readers of this review, in running over the

field of history, will instantly fill these classifications with the names of many men whose leadership has borne large results of good or ill to their party and their country,-Pitt, and Walpole, and Thurlow; the Grenvilles,-who, it has been said, in every change of parties raised the question, "What course should we take now?"-Marlborough and Wellington, Gladstone and Disraeliare fair English types of what we are describing. Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Burr, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Grant are, in our own country, illustrations that will be recognized as just. To mention any now officially connected with our public affairs might seem to be invidious; and to refer by name to those of our citizens now living who have disgraced or overthrown their own party by grasping selfishness or unscrupulous methods, would be unkind.

These, we think, are some of the chief elements and characteristics of those party associations and operations which, in a republican government, are a necessity. But it must not be forgotten that this very necessity implies, in exact proportion to the freedom and power of the people, the right of independent personal opinion, and the duty of free personal action in the choice of "the best of what is possible." The lines of Tennyson have a deeper significance here than with the people to which they were applied:

"It is the land that freemen till,

That sober-suited freedom chose,-
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will."

Yet how many men have been deluded by a party name or bullied by their party associates into supporting it, when they did not believe in the measures the party proposed, were ashamed of the methods resorted to for party success, and held the characters of the leaders and managers in abhorrence, and their abili ties in the smallest esteem.

But leadership and management are nearly as essential to party success as to the success of an army, and the want of good leadership and honest management is often quite as disastrous in the first case as in the last, provided the members of the party are sufficiently informed to know what good leadership is, or sufficiently pure themselves not to be tolerant of dishonest methods in others who manage their canvass.

Falling under one or the other of these alternatives, the

events of 1879 in Maine have been supposed to be significant, while the turning of the scale in two or three States, in the recent Presidential election, by the official and persistent circulation of fac-simile copies of the forged "Morey letter," alleging it to be genuine, is a striking illustration of the unpleasant fact in politics that temporary success is not difficult to be won upon grounds that are shamelessly false, and that men standing by selection as the heads of a party and the directors of its affairs will persist in circulating a forged paper intrinsically suspicious, after it has been denounced, in order to gain votes for their candidate, and who, even when the perjury (suborned by somebody, and paid for out of party funds) committed to screen the guilty has been confessed, take no steps to aid in pursuing the crime to its fountain head, and do not even apologize to the voters who have been deceived by their indorsement of the genuineness and their circulation of the forged letter. When the chiefs of a party reach such a position, either their party must itself be profoundly corrupt or be very wickedly represented. In the younger days of the republic, the Democratic society of Philadelphia declared as a fundamental principle of true Democracy, "that in the choice of persons to fill the offices of the government, it is essential to the existence of a free republic that every citizen should act according to his own judgment, and, therefore, any attempt to corrupt or delude the people in exercising the rights of suffrage, either by promising the favor of one candidate or traducing the character of another, is an offense equally injurious to moral rectitude and civil liberty." These golden words are as true in 1880 as they were in 1795, and, in the light of some phases of modern politics, they warn us of one of the greatest perils to republican institutions.

Political parties, like all other associations of men, necessarily take their nature and tone from the average of the character and intelligence of the persons composing them. In the long run they are not much better and not much worse than their individual members, and so, to be useful to the state, their principles must be, if not perfectly just, at least sincerely and intelligently believed in, their objects definite, and their methods, both in elections and in legislation and administration, fair and honest.

The history of parties in the United States for the first forty years under the Constitution, fulfilled in general these conditions. The division of the first parties into Federalist and Republican,

arose from necessary and intelligent differences of opinion in respect of the best means of securing the States and the people of the Union against the danger of anarchy from the want of sufficient central power, and from the unrestrained excess of democratic notions in government, which had wrecked earlier republics, on one hand, and from the danger of a relapse into an aristocratical and quasi-kingly rule, such as that from which the people had just liberated themselves, on the other. Both parties were sincere, and their leaders, generally, pure and patriotic, and, to a degree, each was right, for there was danger in both directions. One great social element-the institution of slavery-constantly tending, as with the force of gravity, to an aristocracy, existed in many of the chief States of the new Union, although it may be safely concluded from the ordinance of 1787, from the provisions of the Constitution, and from the writings of great political leaders like Jefferson, that it was expected that it would not be allowed to spread under national authority, and that it would gradually become extinct. Other tendencies to the consolidation of power in the hands of the few existed, as did also, in the opposite direction, the extreme and fanatical opinions of the old commonwealths men, and the ideas that liberty implied the right to resist all unpleasant laws, as was soon illustrated by the whisky insurrection and other disturbances.

We have not space to trace in detail the course of parties through successive administrations down to that of General Jackson, beginning in 1829. Names and organizations of parties changed, different administrations succeeded each other, but the course of the government was much the same; order was maintained, justice fairly administered, revenues collected and accounted for, industry and trade developed, and faithful administrative public officers were not made the victims of their liberty of opinion and dismissed for that reason with each change of President. And so strong was the devotion of the people to the Union and the Constitution, that even a suspicion that something hostile to their permanence was contemplated by the convention at Hartford in 1814, proved destructive to the existence of the Federalist party.

With the election and administration of Jackson began the effective existence and domination of the present Democratic party, and of the opposition to it by the Whig party and the Republican party that succeeded it.