Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/761

1858.] for the rough-and-tumble contests of a Democracy, he is admirably fitted to be the minister or the head of an oligarchical Republic. We wish all our Northern Representatives had the boldness and the abilities, we hope none of them will be seduced by the example, of Mr. Cushing.

He is one of those able men whose imputed is even greater than their real mental capacity; because the standard of ordinary men is success,—and success, of a certain kind, is assured to those mixed characters which combine the virtue of courage with the vice of unscrupulousness. An ambitious man, like Louis Napoleon, for example, who sets out with those two best gifts of worldly fortune, a lace with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it, has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom, with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the world between them, the one chose To-day and the other To-morrow.

To enable us to construct a theory of Mr. Cushing's present position, we have two recent productions in print,—his Fourth of July Oration at New York, and his Letter to the Craytonville Committee. But he has seen too many aspirants for the Presidency contrive to drown themselves in their inkstands, and is far too shrewd a man, to elaborate any documentary evidence of his opinions. If we arrive at them, it must be by a process of induction, and by gathering what evidence we can from other sources. Mr. Cushing knows very well that the multitude have nothing but a secondary office in the making of Presidents, and addresses to them only his words, while the initiated alone know what meaning to put on them. If, for example, when he says servant he means slave, when he says Negrophilist he means Republican, and when he says false philanthropy he means the fairest instincts of the human heart, we have a right to suspect that there is also an esoteric significance in the phrases, Loyalty to the Union, Nationality, and Conservatism.

Had a constituent of Mr. Cushing, in the Essex North District, taken a nap of twenty years,—(and if he had invited his Representative to dinner, and got such an answer as the Craytonville letter, the supposition is not extravagant,)—what would have been his amazement, on waking, to find his Member of Congress haranguing an assembly of Original Democrats in Tammany Hall! Caius Marcius addressing the Volscian council of war would occur to him as the only historic parallel for such a rhetorical phenomenon. The one was an ideal, as the other is a commonplace example of the ludicrous contradictions in which men may be involved, who find in personal motives the justification of public conduct. That the chairman of the meeting should have had in his pocket a letter from the candidate of the Buffalo Convention, and that Mr. John Van Buren should have sat upon the platform, while the orator charged the leaders of the Republican Party with interested motives, were merely two of those incidental circumstances by which Fact always vindicates her claim to be more satiric than Fiction. But when Mr. Cushing speaks with exultation of the past and with confidence of the future of the Original Democratic Party, we can think of nothing like it but Charles II. taking the Solemn League and Covenant, with an unctuous allusion to the persecutions Covenanters have undergone, and the triumphs of vital piety to which  look forward.

Mr. Cushing claims that the Democratic Party has originated and carried through every measure that has become a part of the settled policy of the government. This is not very remarkable, if we consider that the party has been in power during by far the greater part