by it, that we demand in public men,—and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of change that is suspicious because it is sudden,—and detrimental to the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest. We hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him,—that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves. It is this kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, Patibulum inter et statuam quàm leve discrimen!
It is not for inconsistencies of policy in matters of indifference that we should blame a mart or a party, but for making questions of honor and morals matters of indifference. Inconsistency is to be settled, not by seeming discrepancies between the action of one day and that of the next, but by the experience which enables us to judge of motives and impulses. Time, which reconciles apparent contradictions, impeaches real ones, and shows a malicious satirical turn, in forcing men into positions where they must break their own necks in attempting to face both ways. Nor is it for inconsistency that we condemn the Democratic Party. There are no trade-winds for the Ship of State, unless it be navigated by higher principles than any the political meteorologists have yet discovered. But there have been mysterious movements, of late, which raise a violent presumption that our Democratic captain and officers are altering the rig and adapting the hold of the vessel to suit the demands of a traffic condemned by the whole civilized world. They are painting out the old name, letter by letter, and putting "Conservative" in its stead. They seem to fancy there is such a thing as a slave-trade-wind, and are attempting to beat up against what they profess to believe a local current and a gust of popular delusion. We think they are destined to find that they are striving against the invincible drift of Humanity and the elemental breath of God. It is an ominous consistency with which we charge the Democratic Party.
Mr. Cushing affirms, that the Republicans have no argument but the "cry of Slavepower!"—which is as eloquent a one as the old Roman's Delenda est Carthago, to those who know how many years of bitter experience, how many memories of danger and forebodings of aggression, are compressed in it. But he is mistaken; Democratic administrations have been busy in supplying arguments, and we complain rather of their abundance than their paucity. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas policy, which even office-holders who had gulped their own professions found too nauseous to swallow, and the Dred Scott decision,—if these be not arguments, then history is no teacher, and events have no logic.
Mr. Cushing adroitly evades the real matter in issue, and assumes that it is a mere question of the relative amount of federal office secured by the North and the South respectively. This may be a very natural view of the case in a man whose map of nationality would seem to be bounded North by a seat in Congress, East by a Chinese Embassy, West by an Attorney-Generalship, and South by the vague line of future contingency; but it hardly solves the difficulty. With char-
