idates is typified in the
unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of the
party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the House
of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate
should win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading
name on the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the
hollowness of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr.
Lincoln's election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise
having once or twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people
found out what it really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended
to convey, we find in it a similitude that is not without significance
as regards the professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who
operates upon it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular
motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative
bells. He does his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with
every jolt on the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the
sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed
that the Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very
much doubt whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the
Constitution would practically be nothing else than his interpretation
of it) would keep the same measured tones that are so easy on the
smooth path of candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State
over some of the rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and
some of those passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new
countries, are rather _corduroy_ in character.

But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that
its prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican
candidate. To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to
coalesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge
faction of that very Democratic party of whose violations of the
Constitution, corruption, and dangerous limberness of principle they
have been the lifelong denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is
perfectly plain that we have only two parties in the field: those who
fa