t which may depend upon its exercise in
this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly
from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican party
was a foregone conclusion.

In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens,
and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though
during its term of office the government be practically as independent
of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the
people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility,--then for the first time he becomes capable
of that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in
the narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to
each other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.

How very far practice is from any likeness to theory a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very
government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys'
debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. As our
party-creeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons,
(who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of
certain ideas,) our politics become personal and narrow to a degree
never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our
Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after
day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right,
but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad
whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. If that personage,
outraged in all the finer sensibilities of our common nature, by
failing to get the contract for suppl