extremes, and the principles of the
second book of the Ethics of Aristotle[5] are altogether unknown to
their philosophy. At one moment they are all for "brandy and bitters,"
at the next, tea and turn-out is the order of the day, Here, you must
"liquor or fight"--there, a little wine for the stomach's sake is
sternly denied to a fit of colic, or an emergency of gripes. The moral
soul of Boston thrills with imaginings of perpetual peace, while St
Louis and New Orleans are volcanoes of war. Listen to the voice of New
England, and you would think that negro slavery was the only crime of
which a nation ever was, or could by possibility be guilty; go to South
Carolina, and you are instructed that "the Domestic Institution" is the
basis of democratic virtue, the cornerstone of the Republican edifice.
Cant, indeed, in one form or other, is the innate vice of the "earnest"
Anglo-Saxon mind, on both sides of the Atlantic, and ridicule is the
weapon which the gods have appointed for its mitigation. You must lay on
the rod with a will, and throw "moral suasion" to the dogs. Above all,
your demagogue dreads satire as vermin the avenging thumb--'Any thing
but that,' squeaks he, 'an you love me. Liken me to Lucifer, or Caius
Gracchus; charge me with ambition, and glorious vices; let me be the
evil genius of the commonwealth, the tinsel villain of the political
melodrama; but don't threaten me with the fool's cap, or write me down
with Dogberry; above all, don't quote me in cold blood, that the foolish
people may see, after the fever heat has subsided, what trash I have
palmed upon them in the name of liberty!' Yet this is the way, Jonathan,
to deal with demagogues. You make too much of yours, man. You are not
the blockhead we take you for after all; but you delight to see your
public men in motley, and the rogues will fool you to the top of your
bent, till it is your pleasure to put down the show. So now that the
piper has to be paid, and a lucid interval appears to be dawning upon
you, to the pillory at once with these "stump" orators, and pot-house
politicians, who have led you into such silly scrapes; turn them about,
and look at them well in the rough, that you may know them again when
you see them, and learn to avoid for the future their foolish and
mischievous counsels.

It is remarkable that while a perception of the ridiculous, perhaps to
excess, is characteristic of the British mind, and is at the bottom of
many defects in t