Chapter IV (4)

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

----I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, _strike in_, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

----Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?--No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

----Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at home,--entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind. Or take a simple and familiar example. You forget a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

----I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.

----Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description. At any rate, when I gave my translation to B.F. to turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,--which the author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with anything on this side the water.

[The above remarks were addressed to the schoolmistress, to whom I handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came and read over her shoulder,--very curious, apparently, but his eyes wandered, I thought. Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried and high, or _thoracic_, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely.--It is none of my business.--After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,--heat, electricity, love.--_Habet_.]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;--the mistakes give a relish to it, I think.

LES SOCIÉTÉS POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

Ces Sociétés là sont une Institution pour suppléer aux besoins d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survécu à leurs émotions à l'égard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Sociétés, on doit avoir le moins de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux dépilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre. Dès le moment qu'on ouvre la porte de la Société, on a un grand intérêt dans toutes les choses dont on ne sait rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste démontre un nouveau _flexor_ du _tarse_ d'un _melolontha vulgaris_. Douze savans improvisés, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du _culex_, se précipitent sur l'instrument, et voient--une grande bulle d'air, dont ils s'émerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un spectacle plein d'instruction--pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Société. Tous les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours d'une demi heure que O^6 N^3 H^5 C^6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est bonne à rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur très désagréable, selon l'habitude des produits chimiques. Après celà, vient un mathématicien qui vous bourre avec des _a+b_ et vous rapporte enfin un _x+y_, dont vous n'avez pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations spéciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez jamais soupçonné l'existence. Ainsi il vous décrit les _follicules_ de _l'appendix vermiformis_ d'un _dzigguetai_. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un _follicule_. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un _appendix vermiformis_. Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du _dzigguetai_. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaissances à la fois, qui s'attachent à votre esprit comme l'eau adhére aux plumes d'un canard. On connait toutes les langues _ex officio_ en devenant membre d'une de ces Sociétés. Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout celà de suite, et s'instruit énormément.

Il y a deux espèces d'individus qu'on trouve toujours à ces Sociétiés: 1° Le membre à questions; 2° Le membre à "Bylaws."

La _question_ est une spécialité. Celui qui en fait métier ne fait jamais des réponses. La question est une manière très commode de dire les choses suivantes: "Me voilà! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,--je respire encore! J'ai des idées,--voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de celà! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacité, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement la bête qu'on pense!"--_Le faiseur de questions donne peu d'attention aux réponses qu'on fait; ce n'est pas là dans sa spécialité._

Le membre à "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les émotions mousseuses et généreuses qui se montrent dans la Société. C'est un empereur manqué,--un tyran à la troisième trituration. C'est un esprit dur, borné, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans la Société, mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce que l'Om est aux Hindous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audelà. Ce mot là c'est la CONSTITUTION!

Lesdites Sociétés publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les trouve abandonnés à sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveau-nés, faute de membrane cutanée, ou même papyracée. Si on aime la botanique, on y trouve une mémoire sur les coquilles; si on fait des études zoölogiques, on trouve un grand tas de q[square root]-1, ce qui doit étre infiniment plus commode que les encyclopédies. Ainsi il est clair comme la métaphysique qu'on doit devenir membre d'une Société telle que nous décrivons.

Recette pour le Dépilatoire Physiophilosophique.
Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
Dépilez avec. Polissez ensuite.

----I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that, a depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he played a part in a tabullo.

No,--said I,--I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll tell you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?--that makes no difference. Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large places.--You never studied averages, as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week, through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.

----Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?--said the landlady's daughter,--who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for conversation.

I was going to talk about averages,--I said,--but I have no objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is on one condition,--that he never lays the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.--The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,--like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day. One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, to take out the really good things which don't tell on the audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery. A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

----No, indeed,--I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the _average_ intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about something which interests everybody. I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,--even when they don't talk very well.

But an _average_, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats: a few old folks,--shiny-headed,--slant up best ear towards the speaker,--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people,--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,--in how many places! I don't say dull _people_, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render _latent_ any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,--a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture, always. I declare to you, that, as the monk said about the picture in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!

----Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses----Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick. In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of the logs in one's fireplace at home.

"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--

if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.

----It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of earning a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

----What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,--and one of them was tyrannical.

----Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and never made mistakes.--He? _Veneers_ in first-rate style. The mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light stuff.--I found ---- very fine in conversational information, the other day, when we were in company. The talk ran upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to Major André. A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion. So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge, that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an opportunity.--Have you seen the "New American Cyclopaedia?" said I.--I have, he replied; I received an early copy.--How far does it go?--He turned red, and answered,--To Araguay.--Oh, said I to myself,--not quite so far as Ararat;--that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will know more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related a similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.--I made a comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted and received many compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's, published long before my remark was repeated. When a person of fair character for literary honesty uses an image such as another has employed before him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently, or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a recollection. I told you the other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it had been borrowed. But I confess I never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the fact of its obviousness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined the class in which Waster Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the _first_ person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the other. I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my supposed property in the above comparison,--knowing well, that, according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do also agree that all Editors of Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well known that different persons may independently utter the same idea,--as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus,--

"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixcrunt,"--

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison, and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.

I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than myself. If I had even suspected that the idea in question was borrowed,--I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on an idea of Swift's.--But what shall I do about these verses I was going to read you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life, will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through your consciousness at some time. I can't help it,--it is too late now. The verses are written, and you must have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear

WHAT WE ALL THINK.

That age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.

That--mother, sister, wife, or child--
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown!

That _but for this_ our souls were free,
And _but for that_ our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race,--
Though doctors think the matter plain,--
That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but _one thousand more_!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with _what we think_,
Their echoes dumb to _what we know_;

That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: GOD is LOVE!

* * * * *

SANDALPHON.

Have you read in the Talmud of old,
In the legends the Rabbins have told
Of the limitless realms of the air,
Have you read it,--the marvellous story
Of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory,
Sandalphon, the Angel of Prayer?

How, erect, at the outermost gate
Of the City Celestial he waits,
With his feet on the ladder of light,
That, crowded with angels unnumbered,
By Jacob was seen, as he slumbered
Alone in the desert at night?

The Angels of Wind and of Fire
Chant only one hymn, and expire
With the song's irresistible stress,--
Expire in their rapture and wonder,
As harp-strings are broken asunder
By the music they throb to express.

But serene in the rapturous throng,
Unmoved by the rush of the song,
With eyes unimpassioned and slow,
Among the dead angels, the deathless
Sandalphon stands listening, breathless,
To sounds that ascend from below,--

From the spirits on earth that adore,
From the souls that entreat and implore
In the frenzy and passion of prayer,--
From the hearts that are broken with losses,
And weary with dragging the crosses
Too heavy for mortals to bear.

And he gathers the prayers as he stands,
And they change into flowers in his hands,
Into garlands of purple and red;
And beneath the great arch of the portal,
Through the streets of the City Immortal,
Is wafted the fragrance they shed.

It is but a legend, I know,--
A fable, a phantom, a show
Of the ancient Rabbinical lore;
Yet the old mediaeval tradition,
The beautiful, strange superstition,
But haunts me and holds me the more.

When I look from my window at night,
And the welkin above is all white,
All throbbing and panting with stars,
Among them majestic is standing
Sandalphon the angel, expanding
His pinions in nebulous bars.

And the legend, I feel, is a part
Of the hunger and thirst of the heart,
The frenzy and fire of the brain,
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain.

* * * * *

MR. BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION.

Mr. Buchanan came into power with the prestige of experience; he was known to have been long in public life; he had been a senator, a secretary, a diplomatist, and almost everything else which is supposed to fit a man for the practical conduct of affairs.

This presumed fitness for office greatly assisted his chances in the Presidential campaign; and it assisted him especially with those timid and conservative minds, of which there are many, apt to conceive that a familiarity with the business and details of government is the same as statesmanship, and to confound the skill and facility acquired by mere routine with a genuine ability in execution. Had these men, however, looked more closely into Mr. Buchanan's official career, they would have found causes for suspecting the validity of their judgment, in the very length and variety of his services. They would have discovered, that, long as these had been and various as they had been, they were quite undistinguished by any peculiar evidences of capacity or aptitude.

He had been, senator, secretary, and diplomatist, it is true; but in no one of these positions had he achieved any remarkable successes. The occasion could not be indicated on which he had risen above the average level of respectability as a public man. There were no salient points in his course,--no splendid developments of mastery,--no great reports, or speeches, or measures, to cause him to be remembered,--and no leading thoughts or acts, to awaken a high and general feeling of admiration on the part of his countrymen. He was never such a senator as Webster was, nor such a secretary as Clay, nor such a diplomatist as Marey. Throughout his protracted official existence, he followed in the wake of his party submissively, doing its appointed work with patience, and vindicating its declared policy with skill, but never emerging as a distinct and prominent figure. He never exhibited any peculiar largeness of mind or loftiness of character; and though he spoke well and wrote well, and played the part of a cool and wary manager, he was scarcely considered a commanding spirit among his fellows. Amid that array of luminaries, indeed, which adorned the Senate, where his chief reputation was made,--among such men as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and Wright,--he shone with a diminished lustre.

Now, forty years of action, in the most conspicuous spheres, unillustrated by a single incident which mankind has, or will have, reason to cite and applaud, were not astonishing evidence of fitness for the chief magistracy; and the event has shown, that Mr. Buchanan was to be regarded as an old politician rather than a practised statesman, that the most serviceable soldier in the ranks may prove to be an indifferent general in command,--and that the experience, for which he was vaunted and trusted, was not that ripening discipline of the mind and heart,

-------"which doth attain
To something of prophetic strain,"--

but that other unlearning use and wont, which

----"chews on wisdom past,
And totters on in blunders to the last."

His administration has been a series of blunders, and worse; it has evinced no mastery; on the other hand, it may be arraigned for inconsistencies the most palpable, for proceedings the most awkward, for a general impotence which places it on a level with that of Tyler or Pierce, and for signal offences against the national sense of decorum and duty.

It is scarcely a year since Mr. Buchanan assumed the reins at Washington. He assumed them under circumstances by which he and his party and the whole country had been taught a great lesson of political duty. The infamous mismanagement of Kansas, by his immediate predecessor, had just shattered the most powerful of our party organizations, and caused a mighty uprising of the masses of the North in defence of menaced freedom. His election was carried amid the extremest hazards, and with the utmost difficulty. Two months more of such ardent debate and such popular enlightenment as were then going forward would have resulted in his defeat. As it was, nearly every Northern State--no matter how firm its previous adherence to the Democratic party--was aroused to a strenuous opposition. Nearly every Northern State pronounced by a stupendous majority against him and against his cause. Nothing but a systematic disguise of the true questions at issue by his own party, and a gratuitous complication of the canvass by means of a foolish third party, saved his followers from the most complete and shameful rout that had been given for many years to any political array. Men of every class, of every shade of faith, joined in that hearty protest against the spirit which animated the Democratic administration, and joined in it, that they might utter the severest rebuke in their power, of its meanness and perfidy.

Mr. Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest, and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in them; but they well up from the deep heart of nations, showing that a chord of sympathy has been touched, with which it is fatal to tamper or to sport. Call it fanaticism, if you will; call it delusion; call it anything; but recollect also that it is out of such feelings that revolutions are born, and by them that awful national crises are determined.

But Mr. Buchanan has not profited, as we shall see, by the monition. His initial act, the choice of a cabinet, in which the only man of national reputation was superannuated, and the others were of little note, gave small hope that he would do so; and his subsequent mistakes might have been augured from the calibre of the counsellors by whom he chose to be surrounded.--But let the men pass, since our object is to discuss measures.

The questions with which the President and his cabinet have had to deal, without following them in the order either of time or importance, may be classified as the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. All these required, for a proper adjustment of them, firmness rather than ability,--a clear perception of the principles of right, rather than abstruse policy,--and vigor of execution, rather than profound diplomatic skill. Yet we do not perceive that our government has displayed, in regard to the treatment of any of these questions, either firmness or ability. It has employed policy enough and diplomacy enough, but the policy has been incoherent and the diplomacy shallow. At the end of the first year of its rule, the most striking result of its general management is the open defection of many of its most powerful friends, and the increased earnestness and energy of all its foes.

The difficulty with the Mormons originated, before the accession of the present administration, in a hasty and improper extension of the Federal authority over a people whose customs and religious opinions were utterly incompatible with those of our own people. The inhabitants of Utah were averse from the outset to the kind of government provided for them at Washington. Having adopted a form of society more like that of Congo and Dahomey than of the United States, and having accepted too literally the prevalent dogma, that every community has the right to form its own institutions for itself,--they preferred the polygamy of barbarism to the monogamy of civilization, and the rod of the priest-prophet Brigham or the seal of Elder Pratt to the sceptre of Governor Steptoe or the sword of Colonel Johnston. Under these circumstances, the duty of the government of the United States was to relinquish its pretensions to supremacy over a nation opposed to its rule, or to maintain that supremacy, if it were necessary, with a strong and unflinching hand. Mr. Buchanan, on his own principles of popular sovereignty, as far as we can understand them, ought, logically, to have adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little force was despatched to the Plains when it was too late in the season; a part of it was needlessly delayed in assisting to choke down freedom in Kansas; and when it attained the hills which guard the passages to the valley of the Salt Lake, it found the canons obstructed by snow, and the roads impassable. The supplies required for its subsistence were scattered in useless profusion from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie, and assistance and action were alike hopeless until the arrival of the spring.[A]

[Footnote: A: More recently the energy and wisdom of Col. Johnston have repaired some of the mischief produced by the dilatoriness of his superiors.]

The same feebleness, which left the poor soldier to perish in the desert, has brought an overflowing treasury nearly to default. Mr. Buchanan, in his Message, discussed the existing financial crisis with much sounding phrase and very decided emphasis. He rebuked the action of the banks, which had presumed to issue notes to the amount of more than three times that of their specie, in a tone of lofty and indignant virtue. He commended them to the strictest vigilance and to the exemplary discipline of the State legislatures, while descanting at large upon the safety, the economy, the beauty, and the glory of a sound hard-money currency. When he entered upon his office, he found the Treasury replete with eagles and dimes; it was so flush, that, in the joy of his heart, he ordered the debts of the United States to be redeemed at a premium of sixteen _per cent_.; and he and his followers were disposed to jubilate over the singular spectacle, that, while all other institutions were failing, the Treasury of the United States was firm and resplendent in its large possession of gold. It was deemed a rare wisdom and success, indeed, which could utter a note of triumph in the midst of so universal a cry of despair; it was deemed a rare piece of liberality, that the government should come to the aid of society in an hour of such dark distress. The stocks of the United States, which had been originally sold at a small advance, were bought back on a very large advance; the usurers and the stock-jobbers received sixteen _per cent_. for what they had bought at a premium of but two or three _per cent_.; and an unparalleled glory shone around the easy vomitories of the Treasury. The foresight and the sagacity of the proceeding were marvellous! In less than a quarter by the moon, the coffers of the government were empty,--the very clerks in its employ went about the streets borrowing money to pay their board-bills,--and the grand-master of the vaults, Mr. Cobb, counting his fingers in despair over the vacant prospect, was compelled, in the extremity of his distress, to fill his limp sacks with paper. Of the nineteen millions of gold which in September distended the public purse, little or nothing remained in December, while in its place were paper bills,--founded, not upon a basis of one-third specie, but upon a basis of--_We promise to pay_! It was a sad application of the high-sounding doctrines of the Message,--a dreadful descent for a pure hard-money government,--and a lamentable conversion of the pompous swagger of October into the shivering collapse of January!

It may be said, that, by this pre-purchase of its own stocks, running at an interest of six _per cent_., the government has saved the amount of interest which would else have accrued between the time of the purchase and the time of ultimate redemption. And this is true to some extent,--and it would show an admirable economy, if the Treasury had had no other use for its money. A government, like an individual, having a large balance of superfluous cash on hand, can do no better with it than to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all points,--it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of this folly, and, for the sake of the poor _éclat_ of coming to the relief of the money-market, (which was no great relief, after all,) they sacrificed the hard-money pretensions of the government, and sunk its character to the level of that of the needy "kiteflier" in Wall Street. Their true course, in the existing condition and aspect of affairs, was to retain their capital, and to institute a most rigid economy, a most searching reduction, in every branch of the public service. We have, however, yet to learn whether any such economy and reduction have been effected.

All this was simply weakness; but in turning from the conduct of the Finances by the administration, to consider its management of Filibusterism, we pass from the consideration of acts of mere debility to the consideration of acts which have a color of duplicity in them. On the Filibusters, as on the Finances, the First Annual Message of the President was outspoken and forcible. It characterized the past and proposed doings of William Walker and his crew, as the common sense and common conscience of the world had already characterised them, as nothing short of piracy and murder. Recognizing the obligations of fraternity and peace as the rule of right in international relations, it pledged the utmost vigilance and energy of the Federal powers against every semblance of freebootery. In pursuance of this promise, orders were issued to the various civil and naval authorities, (orders not very clear, it is true, but clear enough to bear but one meaning in honest and simple minds,) to the effect that they should maintain a sharp watch, and execute a summary arrest of every person suspected of or discovered in unlawful enterprises. The authorities on land, to whom it was easy to hold secret communication with Washington, were found to have very blind eyes and very slippery hands. General Walker and his confederates were taken at New Orleans, but they passed through the courts far more rapidly than goods are apt to pass through the custom-houses. Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom, it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too conspicuous.

But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word. Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out for Walker. He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil. Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste to the President. Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant black, and white, white. Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action, in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant black,--nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. It was the present of a herd of elephants,--of a sea of troubles. Mr. Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words for the public ear; secretly he cherished a _penchant_ for freebooters, or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of obedience, in any subordinate. What to do was the question. He had menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,--so he menaced Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had been ruthlessly torn by an over-officious sailor.

The history of the farce is both argument and comment. Walker was either a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,--or he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our protection to organize warlike enterprises against his fellow-citizens, and as such also amenable to our neutrality laws. In either capacity, and however taken, he should have been severely dealt with by the President. But, unfortunately, Mr. Buchanan, not left to his own instincts of right, is surrounded by assistants who have other than great public motives for their conduct. Walker's schemes were not individual schemes, were not simple projects of piracy and plunder, got up on his own responsibility and for his own ends. Connected with important collateral issues, they received the sympathy and support of others more potent than himself. He was, in a word, the instrument of the propagandist slave-holders, the fear of whom is ever before a President's eyes. As the old barbarian Arbogastes used to say to the later Roman emperors, whom he helped to elevate, "The power which made you is the power which can break you," so these modern masters of the throne dictate and guide its policy. Mr. Buchanan was their man as much as Walker was, and, however grand his speeches before the public, he must do their bidding when things came to the trial.

But this allusion brings us, by an obvious transition, to the last and most important question submitted to the administration,--the question of Kansas,--in the management of which, we think, it will be found that all the before-noted deficiencies of the government have been combined with a criminal disregard of settled principles and almost universal convictions. In reference to Kansas, as in reference to the other topics, the President began with fair and seductive promises. He did not, it is true, either in his Message or anywhere else, that we know of, narrate the actual history of the long contest which has divided that Territory, but he did hold up for the future the brightest hopes of an honest and equitable adjustment of all the past difficulties. He selected and commissioned Robert J. Walker, as Governor, for the express purpose of "pacifying Kansas." Pretending to overlook the past causes of trouble, he announced that everything would now be set right by new elections, in which the whole people should have full opportunity of declaring their will. Mr. Walker went to Kansas with a full determination to carry out this amiable promise of the President. Both he and his secretary, Mr. Stanton, labored strenuously to convince the people of the Territory of his honest purposes, and, by dint of persuasions, pledges, assurances, and oaths, at length succeeded in procuring a pretty general exercise of the franchise. The result was a signal overthrow of the minority which had so long ruled by fraud and violence; and the sincerity of the President is tested by the fact, avouched by both Walker and Stanton, that, from the moment of the success of the Free-State party, he was wroth towards his servants. Stanton was removed and Walker compelled to resign, though their only offence was a laborious prosecution of the President's own policy. Ever since then, he has strained every nerve, and at this moment is straining every nerve, to defeat the well-known legally demonstrated wish of the majority. In the face of his own plighted word, and of the emphatic assurances of his agents, sanctioned by himself, he insists upon imposing on them officers whom they detest and an instrument of government which they spurn. These people of Kansas,--who were to be "pacified,"--to be conciliated,--to be guarantied a just administration,--are denounced in the most virulent and abusive terms as refractory, and are threatened with the coercion of a military force, because they are unwilling to submit to outrage!

The excuse offered by the President for this perfidious course is the Lecompton Constitution, which he professes to consider a legal instrument, framed by a legal Convention, and approved by a legal election of the people,--and which is therefore not to be set aside except by the same sovereign power by which it was created. It would be a good excuse, if it were not a transparent and monstrous quibble from beginning to end. The Lecompton Constitution has no one element of legality in it; from the _Whereas_, to the signatures, it is an imposture;--for neither had the Legislature, that called the Convention in which it was made, lawful authority to do so,--nor was that Convention lawfully constituted,--nor was the alleged adoption of it by the people more than a trick.

A Territory is an inchoate and dependent community, which can be erected into a State only in two ways: first, formally, by an enabling act of Congress, giving permission to the inhabitants to set up for themselves; and second, informally, by a spontaneous and general movement of the people, which Congress must afterwards legitimate. In either case, the consent of Congress, first or last, is necessary to the validity of the proceeding. But a Territorial Legislature, which is the mere creature of Congress, having no powers but what are strictly conveyed to it in the Organic Act instituting the Territorial government, cannot originate a movement to supersede itself, and also to abrogate the authority of Congress. The attempt to do so, as declared by General Jackson's cabinet, in the case of Arkansas, would be, not simply null and void, but unlawful, rebellious; and the President would be obliged to suppress it, if called upon, by force of arms. The Organic Act is the supreme law of the Territory, which can be altered or revoked only by the authority from which it emanated; and every measure commenced or prosecuted with a design to annul that law, to subvert the Territorial government, or to put in force in its place a new government, without the consent of Congress, is a flagrant usurpation.

Now the Lecompton Convention was called not merely without the consent of Congress, but against its consent; it was called by and under the arrangements of the Territorial Legislature; it was not the spontaneous act of the people, a large majority of whom condemned the movement and refused to participate in it; and thus, in its inception, it was unlawful. It was neither regularly nor irregularly proper;--the supreme legislature had not acknowledged it; the masses of society had not acknowledged it; and the entire project possessed no other character than that of a factious scheme for perpetuating the power of a few pro-slavery demagogues.