Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/12

2 affection, the Whig party occupy the advance ground. Protection to the laborer and the producer, to the merchant and manufacturer; integrity and economy in the discharge of official trusts; the vigilant defence, as against the world, of national dignity and honor; the observance of honor and good faith in all our dealings with and treatment of other nations; the establishment and maintenance of a sound currency; an enlargement of the means of revenue, and a proper provision for its safe-keeping; an extension of the resources of the country by the construction of harbors, roads, and canals, as the wants of the people demand them; a vigorous administration of the laws; the separation of the seats of justice, by all possible barriers, from popular impression; the adoption, by constitutional means, of such regulations as shall confine the exercise of Executive power within due bounds; the general promotion of knowledge, and an enlargement of the means of education;—these form an outline of the distinctive principles of the Whig party, and by these and other cognate sentiments and measures it will be known to posterity. When the personal rivalries and partisan asperities of the day shall have been forgotten, and the mellowing hand of Time shall have consigned to the Future only the virtues of the Present, the positions and aims of the Whig party will stand out like watchtowers and beacon-lights on the mountain side, and be referred to and quoted as monuments to inspire, as precedents to guide, another race of statesmen and patriots; and whatever it may now do, the world will then acknowledge the moral heroism of those who, doubtless with some defects and some temporary mistakes, yet withstood in their day, the tide of corruption, the insidious arts of demagogues, and the clamors of faction, and taking their stand on tiie platform of the Constitution, defended the honor and integrity of their country from open and secret assault, and preserved to their countrymen the inestimable blessings of a good government.

The other great political division is as essentially anarcliical in its principles and tendencies. In saying this, we would not be understood as denying to the body of its members their claims to sincerity; for the mass of a people, whatever may be their predilections, and however erroneous their views, arc unquestionably sincere and honest in their professions. But whatever the pretensions of their leaders may be, they are practically working to destroy the prosperity of the nation, to corrupt the morals of the people, to weaken the authority of law, and utterly to change the primitive elements of the government. We know that these are grave charges: we believe that they can be substantiated.

A portion of the evidence lies in actual results. It is an unhappy and imperishable part of the national history. Professing an exclusively democratic creed, and a desire to advance the "greatest good of the greatest number," the period of the dominancy of this party in the government has been signalized by widespread ruin and distress, as plainly as the smouldering pile and the ravaged field ever marked the course of an invading army. A profligate waste of the national treasures; a general depression in all the various branches of business and enterprise; the country without a currency at all equal to its wants; the checking, at a vast loss, the progress of internal improvements; a depreciation of nearly every species of property; a denial to the people of their only means of securing an adequate market for the products of the soil, cheating honest industry of its rewards; a dishonorable feeling with respect to public debts; a blind obedience to party dictation, in which the voice of conscience is stifled and patriotism and the eternal rules of justice thrown aside as worthless considerations; a corruption of the elective franchise; the civil power set at defiance; countenance and support given to organized revolutionary parties acting in direct hostility to the laws, and in subversion of all government; the basest perfidy towards an unoffending nation proposed and upheld, and a candidate for the dignities of the chief magistracy selected on account of his willingness to carry out the foul design;—these acts and consequences have attached themselves to and distinguished the party which has strangely arrogated to itself the title of Democratic, as if democracy consisted not in levelling-up and preserving, but in reducing all things to an equality of degradation and ruin.

Yet these, however disastrous, are less to be regarded. Practical errors of individuals or of nations are comparatively of little consequence. They are of the present, and may be retrieved. They belong soon to history, and their