eled,
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 reelection,
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