While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily,--while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we
became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good
or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November, we
might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus
far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to
the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid
unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in
this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly
from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican party
was a foregone conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens,
and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though
during its term of office the government be practically as independent
of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the
people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility,--then for the first time he becomes capable
of that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in
the narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to
each other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very
government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys'
debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. As our
party-creeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons,
(who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of
certain ideas,) our politics become personal and narrow to a degree
never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our
Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after
day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right,
but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad
whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. If that personage,
outraged in all the finer sensibilities of our common nature, by
failing to get the contract for supplying the District Court-House at
Skreemeropolisville City with revolvers, was led to disparage the
union of these States, it is seized on as proof conclusive that the
party to which he belongs are so many Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is
unanimous only in misspelling the name of that oft-invoked
conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms always in advance,
so that we seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but a
prospective one, looking to the chances of reëlection, and mingling in
all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent
for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures
our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if
matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress
to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President
goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch every member of the
Committee. We are kept normally in that most unprofitable of
predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians measure their
words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of
statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for
opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized
world for patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was
a necessary evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave;
then that it was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it
was a system divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned
under the New. With a representation, three-fifths of it based on the
assumption that negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists
on our acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her
Northern allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the
preamble to the Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the
way of enslaving men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through
the Supreme Court of the United States, that negroes are not men in
the ordinary meaning of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to
find that we have eaten more than was necessary may chance to give us
an indigestion. The slaveholding interest has gone on step by step,
forcing concession after concession, till it needs but little to
secure it forever in the political supremacy of the country. Yield to
its latest demand,--let it mould the evil destiny of the
Territories,--and the thing is done past recall. The next Presidential
Election is to say _Yes_ or _No_.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing
moral degradation on the part of the Nonslaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry, if it
cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right;
and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest
achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed
the accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that
history is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns
through the folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite
true that there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all
questions of right and wrong in the balance of trade; but--we cannot
bring ourselves to believe that it is a wise political economy which
makes cotton by unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which
looks on an immediate money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared
public sentiment. We think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in
proclaiming the new Pretender. The election of November may prove a
Culloden. Whatever its result, it is to settle, for many years to
come, the question whether the American idea is to govern this
continent, whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is
to mould our future, whether we are to recede from principles which
eighteen Christian centuries have been slowly establishing at the cost
of so many saintly lives at the stake and so many heroic ones on the
scaffold and the battle-field, in favor of some fancied assimilation
to the household arrangements of Abraham, of which all that can be
said with certainty is that they did not add to his domestic
happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody
knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The
supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform
the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may
be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal
question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a
question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the
other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the
Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to
that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all
the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged
faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all
take refuge in the Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any
logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the
Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were t'other dear charmer
away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the
unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made
against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is _too_
Constitutional.
Meanwhile the only point in which voters are interested is,--What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others, nay,
over man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing
it, means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has
no rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher
law than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not
merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and
more selfish ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have
convenient phrases to be juggled with before election, and which mean
one thing or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a
particular exigency may seem to require; but since both claim the
regular Democratic nomination, we have little difficulty in divining
what their course would be after the fourth of March, if they should
chance to be elected. We know too well what regular Democracy is, to
like either of the two faces which each shows by turns under the same
hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's story of the Parisian showman,
who in 1789 exhibited the _royal_ Bengal tiger under the new character
of _national_, as more in harmony with the changed order of things.
Could the animal have lived till 1848, he would probably have found
himself offered to the discriminating public as the _democratic_ and
_social_ ornament of the jungle. The Pro-slavery party of this country
seeks the popular favor under even more frequent and incongruous
_aliases_; it is now _national_, now _conservative_, now
_constitutional_; here it represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there
the power of Congress over the Territories; but, under whatever name,
its nature remains unchanged, and its instincts are none the less
predatory and destructive. Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with
sufficient precision in the platform adopted by the Chicago
Convention; but what are we to make of Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs
of the stock in trade of two defunct parties, the Whig and
Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them? or are they only like
the inconsolable widows of Père la Chaise, who, with an eye to former
customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's gravestone to advertise
that they still carry on the business at the old stand? Mr. Everett,
in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us only a string of
reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and Mr. Bell
preserves a silence singularly at variance with his patronymic. The
only public demonstration of principle that we have seen is an
emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man to
lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as it
moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession equally
emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in the
unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of the
party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the House
of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate
should win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading
name on the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the
hollowness of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr.
Lincoln's election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise
having once or twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people
found out what it really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended
to convey, we find in it a similitude that is not without significance
as regards the professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who
operates upon it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular
motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative
bells. He does his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with
every jolt on the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the
sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed
that the Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very
much doubt whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the
Constitution would practically be nothing else than his interpretation
of it) would keep the same measured tones that are so easy on the
smooth path of candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State
over some of the rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and
some of those passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new
countries, are rather _corduroy_ in character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that
its prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican
candidate. To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to
coalesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge
faction of that very Democratic party of whose violations of the
Constitution, corruption, and dangerous limberness of principle they
have been the lifelong denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is
perfectly plain that we have only two parties in the field: those who
favor the extension of slavery, and those who oppose it,--in other
words, a Destructive and a Conservative party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact
is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign
critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to
compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are
promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the _rights_ of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is
Privilege, and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change.
The conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on
the man with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor
with a million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the
beggars who had funded their gains were among the stanchest
reactionaries, and left Rome with the nobility. No question of the
abstract right of property has ever entered directly into our
politics, or ever will,--the point at issue being, whether a certain
exceptional kind of property, already privileged beyond all others,
shall be entitled to still further privileges at the expense of every
other kind. The extension of slavery over new territory means just
this,--that this one kind of property, not recognized as such by the
Constitution, or it would never have been allowed to enter into the
basis of representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy
of the Republic.
A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but
has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he
buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a
horse or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind
of property is,--how shall we say it so as not to violate our
Constitutional obligations?--that it is exceptional. When it leaves
Virginia, it is a thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man,
speaks human language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we
all acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left
behind,--in short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a
Christian hath, and is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians,
except, perhaps, by a simpler and more earnest faith. There are people
at the North who believe, that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is
also such a thing as _suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak
enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that
human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property
whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as
any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes
it harder to recover a fugitive chattel; but the existence of human
nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be
counted on at least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the
cattle-disease; and the man who chooses to put his money into these
images of his Maker cut in ebony should be content to take the
incident risks along with the advantages. We should be very sorry to
deem this risk capable of diminution; for we think that the claims of
a common manhood upon us should be at least as strong as those of
Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man turns away should find
in the larger charity of the law of God and Nature a readier welcome
and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to think the negro a man, and
on Southern evidence, too, as long as he is counted in the population
represented on the floor of Congress,--for three-fifths of perfect
manhood would be a high average even among white men; as long as he is
hanged or worse, as an example and terror to others,--for we do not
punish one animal for the moral improvement of the rest; as long as he
is considered capable of religious instruction,--for we fancy the
gorillas would make short work with a missionary; as long as there are
fears of insurrection,--for we never heard of a combined effort at
revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do not see how the particular
right of whose infringement we hear so much is to be made safer by the
election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas,--there being
quite as little chance that any of them would abolish human nature as
that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The same generous instinct
that leads some among us to sympathize with the sorrows of the
bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others to take part
with the rescued man.
But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high
time that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States,
and of the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to
be respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the
safety of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever
there is soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for
making him a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not
to justice, freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting
with the current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully
nursing the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow
worse?
To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of
free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when
the encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the
Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The
real avalanche to be dreaded, are we to expect it from the
ever-gathering mass of ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility
of animals and the passions of men, which is one of the fatal
necessities of slavery, or from the gradually increasing consciousness
of the non-slaveholding population of the Slave States of the true
cause of their material impoverishment and political inferiority? From
one or the other source its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either
event it is not the Union that will be imperilled, but the privileged
Order who on every occasion of a thwarted whim have menaced its
disruption, and who will then find in it their only safety.
We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"--for we accept Mr.
Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever
meant to give it--is to take place in the South itself; because the
Slave-System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy
which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the
soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower
level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,--their increase in
numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and
nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no
home-encouragement of varied agriculture,--for the wants of a slave
population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland
trade, for that is developed only by communities where education
induces refinement, where facility of communication stimulates
invention and variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's
improvement in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement
to all, and bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap
university of the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that
slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they
fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant
consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing
communities of men, which is the true object of all political
organizations, and which is essential to the prolonged existence of
all those whose life and spirit are derived directly from the people.
Every man who has dispassionately endeavored to enlighten himself in
the matter cannot but see, that, for the many, the course of things in
slaveholding states is substantially what we have described, a
downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and in all those
results of material prosperity which in a free country show themselves
in the general advancement for the good of all and give a real meaning
to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous the wealth centred in
the hands of a few, it has no longer the conservative force or the
beneficent influence which it exerts when equably distributed,--even
loses more of both where a system of absenteeism prevails so largely
as in the South. In such communities the seeds of an "irrepressible
conflict" are purely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily
multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked
for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of
intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the
richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness.
The election in November turns on the single and simple question,
Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and
the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against
such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor
of it, is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted
that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess
that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward
since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater
ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr.
Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for
passing him by,--that he represented the most advanced doctrines of
his party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the
moralist's oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment
of it as a theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,--thus
summing up the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and
concentrated the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man,
he has that best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of
being always able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of
his opinions which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect
of his speeches in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to
their power. Safe from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional
eloquence as if he had been inoculated for it early in his career, he
addresses himself to the reason, and what he says sticks. It was
assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest and
tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We
cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by
sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain
office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest
purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction. It was
not called into being by a desire to reform the pecuniary corruptions
of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr. Breckinridge would do that,
for no one doubts their honor or their honesty. It is not unanimous
about the Tariff, about State-Rights, about many other questions of
policy. What unites the Republicans is a common faith in the early
principles and practice of the Republic, a common persuasion that
slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of the one, has been the
chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve to resist its
encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no reason to fear
that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant tenacity under the
warps and twistings of a forty-years' proslavery pressure, should be
in danger of breaking, if bent backward again gently to its original
rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human government," says Machiavelli,
"have, like men, their natural term, and those only are long-lived
which possess in themselves the power of returning to the principles
on which they were originally founded." It is in a moral aversion to
slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican
party lies. They believe as everybody believed sixty years ago; and we
are sorry to see what appears to be an inclination in some quarters to
blink this aspect of the case, lest the party be charged with want of
conservatism, or, what is worse, with abolitionism. It is and will be
charged with all kinds of dreadful things, whatever it does, and it
has nothing to fear from an upright and downright declaration of its
faith. One part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us
from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that
never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but
submission,--from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man
which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question
which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be
debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such excitement is
healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are
coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is
the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have
once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The
vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of
crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments,
ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal
Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead formula on
men's lips and the dry topic of the annalist. It has been our good
fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has forced us to
reconsider the primal principles of government, which has appealed to
conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories of the
Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our thought
and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory into a
conviction of the understanding and the soul. It will not do for the
Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument, for
the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible sides
to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of Right and
Wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What
Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party-platforms,--that those
are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which
compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.
No man pretends that under the Constitution there is any possibility
of interference with the domestic relations of the individual States;
no party has ever remotely hinted at any such interference; but what
the Republicans affirm is, that in every contingency where the
Constitution can be construed in favor of freedom, it ought to be and
shall be so construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism,
abolitionism, and hostility to the laws. The principles of liberty and
humanity cannot, by virtue of their very nature, be sectional, any
more than light and heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws
are the only serious enemies that Law ever had. With history before
us, it is no treason to question the infallibility of a court; for
courts are never wiser or more venerable than the men composing them,
and a decision that reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any
immunity from reversal. Truth is the only unrepealable thing.
We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to
suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers,
Presidents' messages, and Congress, for the last dozen years, lest we
endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of
government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are
incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of
every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite
opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing.
If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming a judgment for
themselves, the men whose position enables them to guide the public
mind ought certainly to make good their want of intelligence. But on
this great question, the wise solution of which, we are every day
assured, is essential to the permanence of the Union, Mr. Bell has no
opinion at all, Mr. Douglas says it is of no consequence which opinion
prevails, and Mr. Breckinridge tells us vaguely that "all sections
have an equal right in the common Territories." The parties which
support these candidates, however, all agree in affirming that the
election of its special favorite is the one thing that can give back
peace to the distracted country. The distracted country will continue
to take care of itself, as it has done hitherto, and the only question
that needs an answer is, What policy will secure the most prosperous
future to the helpless Territories, which our decision is to make or
mar for all coming time? What will save the country from a Senate and
Supreme Court where freedom shall be forever at a disadvantage?
There is always a fallacy in the argument of the opponents of the
Republican party. They affirm that all the States and all the citizens
of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories.
Undoubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot. The slaveholder
moves into a new Territory with his _institution_, and from that
moment the free white settler is virtually excluded. _His_
institutions he cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves
in soil that is cultivated by slave-labor. Speech is no longer free;
the post-office is Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may
be enough to hang him. Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free
States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a
plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by
means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the
stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions
of Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the
experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's
panacea of "Squatter Sovereignty."
The claim of _equal_ rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy.
Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every
inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom.
For what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,--that
their _local law_ be made the law of the land, and coextensive with
the limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no
unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another;
and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law
makes property," (confounding a law existing anywhere with the law
which is binding everywhere,) can deceive only those who have either
never read the Constitution or are ignorant of the opinions and
intentions of those who framed it. It is true only of the States where
slavery already exists; and it is because the propagandists of slavery
are well aware of this, that they are so anxious to establish by
positive enactment the seemingly moderate title to a right of
existence for their institution in the Territories,--a title which
they do not possess, and the possession of which would give them the
oyster and the Free States the shells. Laws accordingly are asked for
to protect Southern property in the Territories,--that is, to protect
the inhabitants from deciding for themselves what their frame of
government shall be. Such laws will be passed, and the fairest portion
of our national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if the
Non-Slave-holding States fail to do their duty in the present crisis.
But will the election of Mr. Lincoln endanger the Union? It is not a
little remarkable, that, as the prospect of his success increases, the
menaces of secession grow fainter and less frequent. Mr. W.L. Yancey,
to be sure, threatens to secede; but the country can get along without
him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But
Governor Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at
Washington,--perhaps because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it.
The old Mumbo-Jumbo is occasionally paraded at the North, but, however
many old women may be frightened, the pulse of the stock-market
remains provokingly calm. General Cushing, infringing the patent-right
of the late Mr. James the novelist, has seen a solitary horseman on
the edge of the horizon. The exegesis of the vision has been various,
some thinking that it means a Military Despot--though in that case the
force of cavalry would seem to be inadequate,--and others the Pony
Express. If it had been one rider on two horses, the application would
have been more general and less obscure. In fact, the old cry of
Disunion has lost its terrors, if it ever had any, at the North. The
South itself seems to have become alarmed at its own scarecrow, and
speakers there are beginning to assure their hearers that the election
of Mr. Lincoln will do them no harm. We entirely agree with them, for
it will save them from themselves.
To believe any organized attempt by the Republican party to disturb
the existing internal policy of the Southern States possible
presupposes a manifest absurdity. Before anything of the kind could
take place, the country must be in a state of forcible revolution. But
there is no premonitory symptom of any such convulsion, unless we
except Mr. Yancey, and that gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset
will hardly turn the continent head over heels. The administration of
Mr. Lincoln will be conservative, because no government is ever
intentionally otherwise, and because power never knowingly undermines
the foundation on which it rests. All that the Free States demand is
that influence in the councils of the nation to which they are justly
entitled by their population, wealth, and intelligence. That these
elements of prosperity have increased more rapidly among them than in
communities otherwise organized, with greater advantages of soil,
climate, and mineral productions, is certainly no argument that they
are incapable of the duties of efficient and prudent administration,
however strong a one it may be for their endeavoring to secure for the
Territories the single superiority that has made them what they are.
The object of the Republican party is not the abolition of African
slavery, but the utter extirpation of dogmas which are the logical
sequence of the attempts to establish its righteousness and wisdom,
and which would serve equally well to justify the enslavement of every
white man unable to protect himself. They believe that slavery is a
wrong morally, a mistake politically, and a misfortune practically,
wherever it exists; that it has nullified our influence abroad and
forced us to compromise with our better instincts at home; that it has
perverted our government from its legitimate objects, weakened the
respect for the laws by making them the tools of its purposes, and
sapped the faith of men in any higher political morality than interest
or any better statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every lawful
way to hem it within its present limits.
We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than
anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved
both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in
public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a
politician. That he has not had more will be no objection to him in
the eyes of those who have seen the administration of the experienced
public functionary whose term of office is just drawing to a close. He
represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its
advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal
with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser
to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but
in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party,
because they are the only one based on an enduring principle, the only
one that is not willing to pawn tomorrow for the means to gamble with
today. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to
doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces
them.
The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like
those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon
with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an
anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters
swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work
against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old,
fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous
devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant
sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no
trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed
boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in
the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and
believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually
before it. "All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven
blesseth it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no
unrighteous thing."
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