y 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