missioner to China?--in consistency from the Democratic
Attorney-General?--in an amalgam of all three from the Coalition
Judge? Shall we find a more pointed warning of the worthlessness of
success in the words than in the example of the orator? Since Reynard
the Fox donned a friar's hood, and, with the feathers still sticking
in his whiskers, preached against the damnable heresy of hen-stealing,
there has been nothing like this!

In China, they set great store by porcelain that has been often
broken and mended again with silver wire, prizing it more highly
than that which is sound and fresh from the hands of the potter.
There is a kind of political character of the same description,
--hollow-ware, not generally porcelain, indeed,--cracked in every
direction, but deftly bound together with silver strips of preferment,
till it is consistent enough to serve all the need of its possessor
in receiving large messes of the public pottage. How the Chinese
would have admired Mr. Tyler's Commissioner, if they had known the
exquisite perfection of _crackle_ displayed in his political career!
To be sure, the Chinese are our antipodes.

The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound
politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject
himself. Fools and dead men are the only people who never change
their opinions or their course of action. The course of great
statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable
obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels
of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following
and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet
forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the
gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open
paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal
barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling
to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not
to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men,--and not
persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism
to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly
accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of
change that is suspicious because it is sudden,--and detrimental to
the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the
judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinctio