at all
the genial graces fly their companionship; and a libertine Sheridan,
with Ancient Pistol's motto of "Base is the slave that pays," will often
be more popular, even among the creditor portion of the public, than
these crabbed heroes, and, if need be, surly martyrs, of mercantile
honesty and personal honor.

In regard to public life, and the influence of this rough manliness in
politics, it is a matter of daily observation, that, in the strife of
parties and principles, backbone without brain will carry it against
brain without backbone. A politician weakly and amiably in the right is
no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You
cannot, by tying an opinion to a man's tongue, make him the
representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for
principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the
wounded, but among the missing. The true motto for a party is neither
"Measures, not men," nor "Men, not measures," but "Measures _in_
men,"--measures which are in their blood as well as in their brain and
on their lips. Wellington said that Napoleon's presence in the French
army was equivalent to forty thousand additional soldiers; and in a
legislative assembly, Mirabeau and John Adams and John Quincy Adams are
not simply persons who hold a single vote, but forces whose power
thrills through the whole mass of voters. Mean natures always feel a
sort of terror before great natures; and many a base thought has been
unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld, through the fear inspired by
the rebuking presence of one noble man.

Opinions embodied in men, and thus made aggressive and militant, are the
opinions which mark the union of thought with grit. A politician of this
class is not content to comprehend and wield the elements of power
already existing in a community, but he aims to make his individual
conviction and purpose dominant over the convictions and purposes of the
accredited exponents of public opinion. He cares little about his
unpopularity at the start, and doggedly persists in his course against
obstacles which seem insurmountable. A great, but mischievous, example
of this power appeared in our own generation in the person of Mr.
Calhoun, a statesman who stamped his individual mind on the policy and
thinking of the country more definitely, perhaps, than any statesman
since Hamilton, though his influence has, on the whole, been as evil as
Hamilton's was, on