have pleased even Jonathan Edwards
himself. Up to the ripe age of forty-two he had been joined to his
idols. It is a proverb, that he who is a fool at forty will be a
fool at fourscore; yet Mr. Cushing, who is certainly no fool, had
been blind to the beauties of Original Democracy for a year or two
beyond that alliterative era. The Whigs had just succeeded in
electing their candidates, and it seemed as if nothing short of an
almost Providential interposition could save him. That interposition
came in the death of General Harrison, which took away the last earthly
hope of Whig advancement. It was what the jockeys call "a very near
thing." But for that,--it is a sad thought,--Mr. Cushing might have been
on our side now. This was the _gratia operans_. Mr. Tyler, who
succeeded to the Presidency, had Democratic proclivities; this was
the _gratia cooeperans_; and finally we see the _gratia perficiens_
in the appointment of our catechumen to the Chinese Commissionership.
From the Central Flowery Kingdom he returned a full-blown Original
Democrat. In 1853, Mr. Pierce, finding himself elected President
for no other reason apparently than that he had failed to distinguish
himself in the Mexican War, appointed Mr. Cushing his Attorney
General on the same benevolent principle,--consoling him for having
to sheathe a bloodless sword by giving him a chance to draw the more
dangerous Opinion.

We have alluded only to such facts in Mr. Cushing's history as are
fresh in the remembrance of our readers; and it would not have been
worth our while to allude even to these, if he had not seen fit to
speak of the leading men of the Republican Party as "dangerous,
because they have _no fixed principle, no stable convictions, no
samples of consistency to control their acts_; because their _only
creed is what has been called the duty of success_; and because
their success--the successful accomplishment of a sectional
organization of the government on the ruins of its nationality--
would be the _de facto_ dissolution of the Union." In his Letter he
says also, that "it is a fact humiliating to confess that the cant
of negroism still has vogue as one of the minor instruments of
demagoguy in Northern States." The coolness of such charges, coming
from Mr. Cushing, is below the freezing-point of quicksilver. Shall
we take lessons in fixedness of principle from the Whig-Antislavery
Member from Federalist Essex?--in stable convictions from the
Tyler-Com