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 means a passport to success. The stranger visiting the United States is surprised with the entire absence of gentlemanly feeling in political affairs. They are pervaded by a coarse and repulsive vulgarity; they are seldom alluded to in the conversation of the upper classes; and the ruling power in this vast community is in danger of being abandoned to corrupt agitators and noisy charlatans. The President, the Members of Congress, and to a still greater extent the members of the State Legislatures, are the delegates of a tyrannical majority rather than the representatives of the people. The million succeeds in exacting an amount of cringing political subserviency, in attempting to obtain which, in a like degree, few despots have been successful.

The absence of a property qualification, the short term for which the representatives are chosen, and the want, in many instances, of a pecuniary independence among them, combined with a variety of other circumstances, place the members of the Legislatures under the direct control of the populace; they are its servile tools, and are subject to its wayward impulses and its proverbial fickleness; hence the remarkable absence of any fixed line of policy. The public acts of America are isolated; they appear to be framed for the necessities of the moment, under the influence of popular clamour or pressure; and sometimes seem neither to recognise engagements entered into in the past, or the probable course of events in the future. America does not possess a traditional policy, and she does not recognize any broad and well-defined principle as the rule for her conduct. The national acts of spoliation or meanness which have been sanctioned by the