eyes of the people, in spite of its intrinsic iniquity. The party
reaping the benefit of the measure has not withheld the expected reward,
and the originator and abettors of the accomplished wrong have found
that exalted official position covers a multitude of sins.

Wisely availing themselves of this national weakness, and most adroitly
using all the elements of political power with which long practice had
made them familiar, the leaders of the Democratic party had every reason
to believe that the duration of their political supremacy would be
coeval with the life of the Republic. In fact, the peril predicted more
than twenty years ago, by one of the purest and wisest men whom this
country has ever seen, with a sagacity which, in the light of subsequent
events, seems almost inspired, had wellnigh become an historical fact.
"The great danger to our institutions," said Dr. Channing, writing to a
friend in 1841, "is of a party organization so subtle and strong as to
make the Government the monopoly of a few leaders, and to insure the
transmission of the executive power from hand to hand almost as
regularly as in a monarchy."

But an overruling Providence, building better than we knew, had decreed
that the sway of this powerful party should be broken by means of the
very element of supposed strength on which it so confidently relied for
unlimited supremacy. Losing sight of those cardinal principles which the
far-reaching sagacity of Jefferson had enunciated, and faithfully
following which the Democracy had, during its early history, so
completely controlled the country, the modern leaders, intent only on
present success, had based all their political hopes on an intimate
alliance, offensive and defensive, with that institution which Jefferson
so eloquently denounced, and the existence of which awakened his most
lively fears for the future of his country. And what has been the
result of this ill-omened alliance? Precisely what might sooner or later
have been expected. Precisely what might have been predicted from the
attempt to unite the essentially incongruous ideas of Aristocracy and
Democracy. For the system of Slavery is confessedly the very essence of
an Aristocracy, while the genuine idea of a Democracy is the submission
of all to the expressed will of the majority. Take as one of the latest
illustrations of the irreconcilable difference between Aristocracy and
Democracy, the manner in which the South received the doc