led into being by a desire to reform the pecuniary corruptions
of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr. Breckinridge would do that,
for no one doubts their honor or their honesty. It is not unanimous
about the Tariff, about State-Rights, about many other questions of
policy. What unites the Republicans is a common faith in the early
principles and practice of the Republic, a common persuasion that
slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of the one, has been the
chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve to resist its
encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no reason to fear
that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant tenacity under the
warps and twistings of a forty-years' proslavery pressure, should be
in danger of breaking, if bent backward again gently to its original
rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human government," says Machiavelli,
"have, like men, their natural term, and those only are long-lived
which possess in themselves the power of returning to the principles
on which they were originally founded." It is in a moral aversion to
slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican
party lies. They believe as everybody believed sixty years ago; and we
are sorry to see what appears to be an inclination in some quarters to
blink this aspect of the case, lest the party be charged with want of
conservatism, or, what is worse, with abolitionism. It is and will be
charged with all kinds of dreadful things, whatever it does, and it
has nothing to fear from an upright and downright declaration of its
faith. One part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us
from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that
never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but
submission,--from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man
which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question
which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be
debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such excitement is
healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are
coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is
the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have
once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The
vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of
crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments,
ceases to act;