ERSON 56

GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178

ANDREW JOHNSON 264

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302

POLITICAL ESSAYS

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

1858

There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the
hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of
the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch
whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of
his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions
whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the
political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of
all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his
hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.

The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as
would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become
king.

If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told
that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications,
lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the
African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent
for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs
could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
Bartholomew,--that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee
dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save
the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could
not read, on the depravity of the double shuffle,--that they would
consent to be fellow members in the Tract Society with him who sold
their fellow members in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed with
them in condemning Transubstantiation (and it would not be difficult
for a gentleman who ignored the real presence