among which was the notion
that a man was the better representative of the democratic principle
who had contrived to push himself forward to popularity by whatever
means, and who represented the average instead of the highest culture
of the community, thus establishing an aristocracy of mediocrity, nay,
even of vulgarity, in some less intelligent constituencies. The one
great strength of democracy is, that it opens all the highways of power
and station to the better man, that it gives every man the chance of
rising to his natural level; and its great weakness is in its tendency
to urge this principle to a vicious excess, by pushing men forward into
positions for which they are unfit, not so much because they deserve to
rise, or because they have risen by great qualities, as because they
began low. Our quadrennial change of offices, which turns public
service into a matter of bargain and sale instead of the reward of
merit and capacity, which sends men to Congress to represent private
interests in the sharing of plunder, without regard to any claims of
statesmanship or questions of national policy, as if the ship of state
were periodically captured by privateers, has hastened our downward
progress in the evil way. By making the administration prominent at the
cost of the government, and by its constant lesson of scramble and
vicissitude, almost obliterating the idea of orderly permanence, it has
tended in no small measure to make disruption possible, for Mr.
Lincoln's election threw the weight of every office-holder in the South
into the scale of Secession. The war, however, has proved that the core
of Democracy was sound; that the people, if they had been neglectful of
their duties, or had misapprehended them, had not become corrupt.

Mr. Greeley's volume is a valuable contribution to our political
history. Though for many years well known as an ardent politician, and
associated by popular prejudice with that class of untried social
theories which are known by the name of _isms_, his tone is
singularly calm and dispassionate. Disfigured here and there by a
vulgarism which adds nothing to its point, while it detracts from its
purity, his style is clear, straightforward, and masculine,--a good
business style, at once bare of ornament and undiluted with eloquence.
Mr. Greeley's intimate knowledge of our politics and instinctive
sympathy with the far-reaching scope of our institutions (for, as
Beranger said of himself, he i