estic; not from anything inherent in those free
principles; but from a cause exceedingly paradoxical: a democratic
people leaving to a party, to a section, the Government which should be
their very own; the virtue and intelligence of the nation absenting
themselves from the national councils, thus making way for corruption
and fraud to enter in an overwhelming flood; one half of the nation
rocking its conscience to sleep with the false lullaby of commercial
greatness and material prosperity, and the other, left to do the
governing, with seemingly no conscience at all, going to work with
satanic directness and acuteness, to undermine the principles thus left
without a guardian, and to inject the black blood of slavery into the
veins of the body politic, till the name _democracy_ became a misnomer
the most wretched, a sarcasm the most touching. I do not imagine we
shall ever again go back to that. It must be that, in future, the
American people will grow into the habit of demanding that an
enlightened, patriotic statesmanship shall rule, instead of an
unprincipled demagoguism. Also, that they will attend to it that better
men are sent to Washington; men chosen because they represent most
nearly the great national ideas and interests, which the people will
require shall absorb legislation rather than any sectional institution
whatever; and not because, primarily, they are the subservient idols of
this or that party. It must be that, hereafter, party will be less and
the nation more. Of course, parties will exist, necessarily; but if this
great American people, having carried on to perfect success this war
against a stupendous rebellion, and having gone through the school of
knowledge and experience it has been to them, can again settle down into
the mere political jobbery into which governmental affairs had
deteriorated before the earthquake of war stirred up the dregs of
things, it would be an instance of fruitless expenditure of means and
life, and of self-stultification, too pitiful for words--such an
instance as the world has not yet seen, thanks to the ordained
progression of the world.

When peace returns to the land once more; when the fierce fever of blood
and strife is quelled; when the vague fears and uncertainties of this
period of transition are over, and the keen pangs and bloody sweat of
the nation's new birth are all past--what will be the position of this
American people? I tremble to contemplate it. It wil