Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/129

1845.] in the course of political contests in our country: we fervently pray that it may never occur again. The defunct carcass of Tylerism bred a political pestilence, congenial to the vitality of Locofocoism, and it throve upon it—fatal to healthier organs, and we were enfeebled by the malaria. The facts of this case transcend the wisdom of the apologue—the dead ass has here triumphed over the living lion.

The precise weight in the determination of the conflict, which this novel and unhappy influence was enabled to exert, we cannot pretend to estimate; but we say with confidence, that, all other things remaining as they were, this disturbing cause rendered the fight any thing but a fair one, and would alone have accounted for a vastly more unfavorable result than we now have occasion to deplore.

But there is another characteristic of the late cau'paign, so deeply branded with infamy, so full of woful menace to the very existence of free institutions, that nothing but the clearest evidence could have proved its prevalence to ourselves, nothing but a stern sense of duty lead us to expose its deformity to our readers. We regard the presence, activity, and vigilance of great political parties, in this country, as alike essential to the permanence of liberty and the best security for the virtual and beneficent dominion of constitutional government. Faction and cabal are very different agents in a political system, and fraught with far other tendencies. A party is an organized union upon the basis of a principle or a system of principles, and proposes the good of the country; opposing parties differ in their principles, and of course in their measures, but agree in their object—the common weal. A faction confines its aims and objects within itself; "its be all and its end all," is self-aggrandizement. Factions, then, are as much the foes of popular governments, as parties are their ministers and defenders. The generous spirit of party, vehement though it be, invigorates and warms, cherishes and sustains, the whole fabric of the State; the gnawing tooth of faction corrodes every prop, and its insatiate thirst exhausts every spring of public prosperity. Little parties, operating within narrow circles, dealing with small interests, and, of necessity, confounding somewhat personal and public concerns, are constantly in danger of sinking into factions. But the dignity, amplitude, and diversity of the elements which make up the character and the substance, the soul and the body, of a great national party, have hitherto been supposed to present sufficient obstacles to a general degradation of its objects, and an universal profligacy in its means and measures. Such a general degradation and such an universal profligacy, when they once thoroughly obtain in a powerful party of an empire or a state, augur a decay of public virtue in the leading minds of a people, and a coldness of patriotism in its common mass, which, unchecked, must precipitate its ruin.

With these opinions, and in spite of our sincere desire to avoid a conclusion so painful to our national vanity, and so pregnant with ill omens for our national well-being, a candid examination of all the points of the case cannot spare us the conviction, that the late Presidential election was a struggle between a party and a faction—that our opponents, deliberately and systematically, abandoned every man, renounced every measure, and abjured every principle, to which they had been, however sacredly, committed; and this too, with a carelessness of disguise, a scorn of dissimulation, and a contempt of the decencies of knavery, which laugh at description and defy exaggeration. They adapted the motto of kingly pride—"L' Etat, c'est Moi"—to the purposes of democratic humility. "The Republic—it is our party"; and this great postulate gained, they strode with hasty logic through the necessary deductions, and with a shrewd practical philosophy, expressed the results of their "pure reason" in most definite and forcible action. Some guilty mind, capacious of such things, suggested the bold experiment of setting up for the suffrages of a free and enlightened people Democracy in the abstract, not embodied in any system of principles, nor yet shaped into any project of measures, not even incarnate in the form of any man. The omnipotence of the "popular element" was to be illustrated and established beyond all cavil, for out of nothing it should create something:—the right and the capacity of the people to choose their own rulers were to be vindicated by the extremest test—requiring them to vote for nobody knew whom, for nobody knew what, and as nobody knew why.

The first great step in reducing this novel plan to practice, was the summary disposition which was made of Mr Van Buren by the Nominating Convention,