But
he might have saved himself from the evil fame of being the first of our
Presidents who could never forget himself into a feeling of the
dignity of the place he occupied. He has always seemed to consider the
Presidency as a retaining-fee paid him by the slavery-propagandists,
and his Message to the present Congress looks like the last juiceless
squeeze of the orange which the South is tossing contemptuously away.

Mr. Buchanan admits as real the assumed wrongs of the South Carolina
revolutionists, and even, if we understand him, allows that they are
great enough to justify revolution. But he advises the secessionists to
pause and try what can be done by negotiation. He sees in the internal
history of the country only a series of injuries inflicted by the
Free upon the Slave States; yet he affirms, that, so far as Federal
legislation is concerned, the rights of the South have never been
assailed, except in the single instance of the Missouri Compromise,
which gave to Slavery the unqualified possession of territory which the
Free States might till then have disputed. Yet that bargain, a losing
one as it was on the part of the Free States, having been annulled, can
hardly be reckoned a present grievance. South Carolina had quite as long
a list of intolerable oppressions to resent in 1832 as now, and not one
of them, as a ground of complaint, could be compared with the refusal
to pay the French-Spoliation claims of Massachusetts. The secession
movement then, as now, had its origin in the ambition of disappointed
politicians. If its present leaders are more numerous, none of them are
so able as Mr. Calhoun; and if it has now any other object than it had
then, it is to win by intimidation advantages that shall more than
compensate for its loss in the elections.

In 1832, General Jackson bluntly called the South Carolina doctrines
treason, and the country sustained him. That they are not characterized
in the same way now does not prove any difference in the thing, but only
in the times and the men. They are none the less treason because
James Buchanan is less than Andrew Jackson, but they are all the more
dangerous.

It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of
their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands
of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than
as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal
consideration or of livelih