Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/767

1858.] Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?

We of the Free States are confessedly without our fair share of influence in the administration of national affairs. Its foreign and domestic policy are both directed by principles often hostile to our interests, sometimes abhorrent to our sense of right and honor. Under loud professions of Democracy, the powers of the central government and of the Executive have increased till they have scarcely a match among the despotisms of Europe, and more than justify the prophetic fears of practical statesmen like Samuel Adams and foresighted politicians like Jefferson. Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it. Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an Aristocracy over a Democracy? to any mental inferiority, to lack of courage, of political ability, of continuity of purpose, on our own part? We should be slow to find the cause in reasons like these; but we do find it in that moral disintegration, the necessary result of that falsehood to our own sense of right forced upon us by the slave-system, and which, beginning with our public men, has gradually spread to the Press, the Pulpit, nay, worse than all, the home, till it is hard to find a private conscience that is not tainted with the contagious mange.

For what have we not seen within the last few years? We have seen the nomination to office made dependent, not on the candidates being large enough to fill, but small enough to take it. Holding the purity of elections as a first article of our creed, we have seen one-third of the population of a Territory control the other two-thirds by false or illegal votes; hereditary foes of a standing army, we have seen four thousand troops stationed in Kansas to make forged ballots good by real bullets; lovers of fair play, we have seen a cowardly rabble from the Slave States protected by Federal bayonets while they committed robbery, arson, and Sepoy atrocities against women, and the Democratic party forced to swallow this nauseous mixture of force, fraud, and Executive usurpation, under the name of Popular Sovereignty. We have seen Freedom pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the republic. We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade. We have seen the attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies. We have seen a pirate, for the hanging of whom the conscious Earth would have produced a tree, had none before existed, threaten the successor of Washington with the exposure of his complicity, if he did not publicly violate the faith he had publicly pledged.—But enough, and more than enough.

It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them. But the reform must be wide and deep, and its political objects must be attained by household, means. Our sense of private honor and integrity must be quickened our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a stain upon his own personal integrity; we must become convinced that a government without conscience is the necessary result of a people careless of their duties, and therefore unworthy of their rights. Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered