ys sticks. It was assumed that his nomination
would have embittered the contest and tainted the Republican creed with
radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not
hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not
a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite
aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound
conviction. It was not called into being by a desire to reform the
pecuniary corruptions of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr.
Breckinridge would do that, for no one doubts their honor or their
honesty. It is not unanimous about the Tariff, about State-Rights,
about many other questions of policy. What unites the Republicans is a
common faith in the early principles and practice of the Republic, a
common persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of
the one, has been the chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve
to resist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no
reason to fear that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant
tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years' pro-slavery
pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again
gently to its original rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human
government," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their natural term, and
those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of
returning to the principles on which they were originally founded."

It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief
strength of the Republican party lies. They believe as everybody
believed sixty years ago; and we are sorry to see what appears to be an
inclination in some quarters to blink this aspect of the case, lest the
party be charged with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with
abolitionism. It is and will be charged with all kinds of dreadful
things, whatever it does, and it has nothing to fear from an upright
and downright declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful work
it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession
for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would
not be peace, but submission,--from that torpor and imbecility of faith
in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism.
A question which cuts so deep as that which now divides the country
cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such
excitement is