as the imperial brain, and who found their strength
in a national virtue which individualized itself in every citizen. The
wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through
the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies
than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White
House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press,
ominous of popular decadence.

Do our leading politicians, and the prominent bankers and merchants who
sustain them, know what a dangerous lesson they are setting to a people
whose affairs are controlled by universal suffrage, when they affirm
that to be right which can by any false pretence be voted so? Does not
he who undermines national principle sap the foundations of individual
property also? If burglary may be committed on a commonwealth under
form of law, is there any logic that will protect a bank-vault or a
strong-box? When Mr. Buchanan, with a Jew broker at one elbow and a
Frenchman at the other, (strange representatives of American diplomacy!)
signed his name to the Ostend circular, was he not setting a
writing-lesson for American youth to copy, and one which the pirate hand
of Walker _did_ copy in ungainly letters of fire and blood in Nicaragua?

The vice of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of
personal responsibility. The guilt of every national sin comes back to
the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions.
It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their
constituencies or to the people. The President of the United States,
during his four years of office, is less amenable to public opinion than
the Queen of England through her ministers; senators, with embassies in
prospect, laugh at instructions; representatives think they have made a
good bargain when they exchange the barren approval of constituencies
for the smile of one whom a lucky death, perhaps, has converted into
the Presidential Midas of the moment; and in a nation of adventurers,
success is too easily allowed to sanctify a speculation by which a man
sells his pitiful self for a better price than even a Jew could get for
the Saviour of the world. It cannot be too often repeated, that the only
responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of
every individual man in it to his conscience and his God. As long
as any one of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we
som