ts baser
elements. Such an opposition the Democratic Party seems lately to
have devoted all its policy to build up, and now, confronted with it,
can find no remedy but in the abolishment of morals and conscience
altogether.

The Democratic Party, like the distinguished ancestor of Jonathan
Wild, has been impartially on both sides of every question of
domestic policy which has arisen since it came into political
existence. It has been _pro_ and _con_ in regard to a Navy, a
National Bank, Internal Improvements, Protection, Hard Money, and
Missouri Compromise. Its leading doctrine was State Rights; its whole
course of action, culminating in the Dred Scott decision, has been
in the direction of Centralization. During all these changes, it has
contrived to have the Constitution always on its side by the simple
application of Swift's axiom, "Orthodoxy is _my_ doxy, Heterodoxy is
_thy_ doxy," though it has had as many doxies as Cowley. Sometimes
it has even had two at once, as in refusing to the iron of
Pennsylvania the protection it gave to the sugar of Louisiana.
Pennsylvania avenged herself by the fatal gift of Mr. Buchanan.
There is one exception to the amiable impartiality of the party,--it
has been always and energetically pro-slavery. In this respect
Mr. Cushing has the advantage of it, for he has been on both sides
of the Slavery question also. It must be granted, however, that his
lapse into _Negrophilism_ was but a momentary weakness, and that
without it the Whig Party would have lost the advantage of his
character, and the lesson of his desertion, in Congress. He is said
to be master of several tongues, and it is therefore quite natural
that he should have held a different language at different times on
many different questions.

A creed so various that it seemed to be, not one, but every creed's
epitome, could not fail to be strangely attractive to a mind so
versatile as that of Mr. Cushing; yet we cannot deny to his
conversion some remarkable features which give it a peculiar interest.
In some respects his case offers a pleasing contrast to that of the
Rev. John Newton; for, as the latter was converted from slave-trading
to Christianity, so Mr. Cushing (whatever he may have renounced)
seems to have embraced something very like the principles which the
friend of Cowper abandoned,--another example of the beautiful
compensations by which the balance of Nature is preserved. And his
conversion was sudden enough to