o responsible to his God. He does forget
this, when he acts for political interests, and as one of a party, as he
never would act in his private affairs. And does he suppose that there
is a corporate vice, or virtue, differing from his private vice or
virtue, as a gentleman's purse differs from the public fund? There is no
such distinction in moral qualities. It is your own coin that helps
swell the amount; it bears your stamp, and you are responsible for the
product. If the party lies, then _you_ are guilty of falsehood. If the
party--as is very likely--does a mean thing, then _you_ do it. It is
surely so, so far as you are one of the party, and go with it in its
action. God does not take account of parties; party names are not known
in that court of Divine Judgment; but your name and mine are on the
books there. There is no such thing--and this is true, perhaps, in more
senses than one--there is no such thing as a party conscience. It is
individual conscience that is implicated. Party! Party! Ah! my friends,
here is the influence which, it is to be feared, balks and falsifies
many of these glorious symbols. Men rally round musty epithets. They
take up issues which have no more relation to the deep, vital, throbbing
interest of the time, than they have to the fashions of our
grandfathers. They parade high-sounding principles to cover selfish
ends; interpret the Constitution by a doctrine of loaves and fishes;
while individual independence and private conviction are whirled away in
the political maelstrom, and the party-badge is reverenced and hugged as
the African reverences and hugs his fetish. And surely it is a case for
congratulation, when some great, exciting question breaks out and jars
these conventional idols, and so sweeps and shatters these party
organizations and turns them topsy-turvy, that a man is shaken out of
his harness, does not know exactly what party he _does_ belong to, and
begins to feel that he has a soul of his own. I am not denying the use
and the necessity of parties as instruments, but protest against them as
ends, especially when principle is smothered under their platforms, and
they absorb the moral personality of a man.

It may not seem so strange that the political field should so often be
the field of a lax and depressed morality, when we consider that here is
the great theatre where human ambition struggles for its aims; here are
enlisted the strongest passions of the soul; here throng s