the people, excepting upon some real or affected basis of experience, sagacity, and worth. Popular representatives in all stations, from the President down to the village constable, were selected with a view to their fitness to exercise their respective functions, and to shield their constituents from the troubles which are inseparable from the mutations of time, the instability of men's minds, and the fallibility of human institutions. Political storms were little feared, because the ship of State was known to be staunch and strong, and to be guided by skilful pilots. Within a quarter of a century this happy state of things has slowly but surely changed. Party lines have been gradually drawn away from national to individual concerns, and the elective franchise has been prostituted to fill public offices with tricksters and managers, so that place has become the invariable prey of the most venal jobber or cunning and successful intriguer. Not only in our large cities and upon our lines of communication, but in the National and State capitals, moneyed interests have successively outbidden each other for power, until the very existence of great men and pure minds has become frayed out of political life. The nomination and election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States, are the last and most striking proofs of the truth of this assertion. Without any reference to personal merits or demerits, no individual so obscure could, in more halcyon days, or in a healthy state of the Confederation, have been bought forward for an office so responsible as the Chief Magistracy of thirty millions of people." "Popular governments- that is, governments resting upon a broad suffrage basis and a free press-cannot permanently retain in their service the best men of the country. As the stream will not rise higher than its fountain, so a representative government, in the proper acceptation of that term, will only attract to its service the average talent and morality of the people represented. We have been feeling for years the silent operation of this law upon every department of our government, state and national. Every one who has made the effort knows how hard a thing it is to get our more worthy and capable citizens to accept political trusts of any description. To find America's great men we must seek the shades of professional life, or the great centres of material industry. We take little risk in saying that there are more of the higher qualities of manhood employed in directing the productive industry of this country than in all the executive departments of the federal government combined. Of course we must not be understood to intimate that firstclass men are never to be found in political life among us, for the very statesman who has awakened these reflections would be a living and conclusive testimony against us. It cannot . be disguised that many of the cleverest men this country has produced have devoted the best energies of their lives to political employments. So we often see men in other professions who waste a large portion of their abilities from never discovering, until it is too late, that they were out of place. We only speak of the tendency of our institutions to attract the average virtue and inteliigence into the public service; and when they do attract a higher grade of men, it is, as a general thing, their misfortune; it conduces neither to their happiness nor to their usefulness, and, in nine cases out of ten, discharges them from its service disappointed, if not broken-hearted." "They traced this degradation and danger through the ramifications of trade, fashion, professional life, and manners, and almost demonstrated the essential truth of Macaulay's statements in regard to the effect of universal suffrage on this continent. There was nothing L morbid, spiteful, or croaking in these views; they were illustrated by facts, proved by statistics, and the inference was irresistible that the cure of these prolific evils-the stay for this downward tendency-must be sought in social reformation; that individuals and communities must take a stand, apart from old party organizations, on the same principle that volunteer corps are raised during an invasion. There must be a propaganda, a fraternity based on disinterested fealty and reform-acting, writing, speaking in concert-until power is transferred once more to honest men, to intelligent citizens, and to patriots. In great exigencies such social combinations and protests have been effectiveas witness the overthrow of the slave-trade, the temperance reformation, etc.; and the facts of the hour, and prospects of the future, warn us that the time approaches when, unless the good men and true, the wise and patriotic, join hands, and minds, and hearts, in this holy cause, what is now a vague and elemental, will become an organized and integral malady, fatal to the grandest experiment in self-government the world has ever seen!" CHAPTER III. THE SLAVERY QUESTION AND THE WAR OF RACES. "There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies." LONGFELLOW. peace THE New World by no means realizes the and harmony of a golden age. Everywhere on the continent of North America contests are raging, arising chiefly out of the antipathy of race to race, or the incompatibility of one race or nation with another. The Pale Face and the Red Indian, the Caucasian and the Negro, the Celt and the Saxon, the French and the English, the North and the South, are either at open war or in a state of chronic discontent with one another; and, as if the prejudices of race do not engender enough of bitterness and animosity, religious feuds add fuel to the fire, and the enmities of Catholic and Protestant |