me eminent member of their party of whom they had never heard, or
whom they had forgotten as thoroughly as they had Mr. Douglas, or if we
consider that they were involuntarily giving vent to their delight at
the pleasing prospect opened by their "illustrious guest's" allusion to
his speedy departure. Nor could anything have been imagined beforehand
so ludicrously ominous as Mr. Seward's fears lest the platform should
break down under them at Niagara. They were groundless fears, it is
true, for the Johnson platform gave way irreparably on the 22d of
February; but they at least luckily prevented Nicholas Bottom Cromwell
from uttering his after-dinner threat against the people's immediate
representatives, against the very body whose vote supplies the funds of
his party, and whose money, it seems, is constitutional, even if its
own existence as a Congress be not. We pity Mr. Seward in his new
office of bear-leader. How he must hate his Bruin when it turns out
that his tricks do not even please the crowd!

But the ostensible object of this indecent orgy seems to us almost as
discreditable as the purpose it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A.
Douglas, that the President, with his Cabinet and the two highest
officers of the army and navy, should add their official dignity to the
raising of his monument, and make the whole country an accomplice in
consecrating his memory? His name is not associated with a single
measure of national importance, unless upon the wrong side. So far was
he from being a statesman that, even on the lower ground of politics,
both his principles and his expression of them were tainted with the
reek of vulgar associations. A man of naturally great abilities he
certainly was, but wholly without that instinct for the higher
atmosphere of thought or ethics which alone makes them of value to any
but their possessor, and without which they are more often dangerous
than serviceable to the commonwealth. He habitually courted those
weaknesses in the people which tend to degrade them into a populace,
instead of appealing to the virtues that grow by use, and whose mere
acknowledgment in a man in some sort ennobles him. And by doing this he
proved that he despised the very masses whose sweet breaths he wooed,
and had no faith in the system under which alone such a one as he could
have been able to climb so high. He never deserted the South to take
side with the country till the South had both betrayed and deserted