ced by the example, of Mr. Cushing.

He is one of those able men whose imputed is even greater than their
real mental capacity; because the standard of ordinary men is success,
--and success, of a certain kind, is assured to those mixed
characters which combine the virtue of courage with the vice of
unscrupulousness. An ambitious man, like Louis Napoleon, for example,
who sets out with those two best gifts of worldly fortune, a lace
with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it,
has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to
gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness
to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But
time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation
which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom,
with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the
world between them, the one chose To-day and the other To-morrow.

To enable us to construct a theory of Mr. Cushing's present position,
we have two recent productions in print,--his Fourth of July Oration
at New York, and his Letter to the Craytonville Committee. But he
has seen too many aspirants for the Presidency contrive to drown
themselves in their inkstands, and is far too shrewd a man, to
elaborate any documentary evidence of his opinions. If we arrive at
them, it must be by a process of induction, and by gathering what
evidence we can from other sources. Mr. Cushing knows very well that
the multitude have nothing but a secondary office in the making of
Presidents, and addresses to them only his words, while the
initiated alone know what meaning to put on them. If, for example,
when he says _servant_ he means _slave_, when he says _Negrophilist_
he means _Republican_, and when he says _false philanthropy_ he
means _the fairest instincts of the human heart_, we have a right to
suspect that there is also an esoteric significance in the phrases,
_Loyalty to the Union_, _Nationality_, and _Conservatism_.

Had a constituent of Mr. Cushing, in the Essex North District, taken
a nap of twenty years,--(and if he had invited his Representative to
dinner, and got such an answer as the Craytonville letter, the
supposition is not extravagant,)--what would have been his amazement,
on waking, to find his Member of Congress haranguing an assembly of
Original Democrats in Tammany Hall! Caius Marcius addressing the
Volscian council of