Here, then, we see the highest law officer of the State openly "bidding" for office--truckling to faction--and indecently condescending to enact the part of a "soft-sawderer." That term, we presume, is the proper American equivalent for the stinging _soubriquet_ with which Persius stigmatises some Chatfield--some supple attorney-general of his day-- "PALPO, quem ducit _hiantem_ Cretata ambitio." When persons of the highest official position scruple not thus undisguisedly to trim their course according to the "_popularis aura_," one can scarcely help suspecting a want of firmness of principle and genuine independence among the classes below them. De Tocqueville's observations have taught us to doubt whether the tree of liberty that grows under the shadow of a tyrant majority can ever attain a healthy stability, however vigorous it may appear externally. No one questions that the Americans enjoy, under their institutions, very many of the blessings of a liberal and cheaply-administered government. You have perfect liberty of speech and action, so far as the government is concerned. The avowal of one's opinion is not followed, as in Italy, or in the rival republic of France, by a hint that your passport is ready, or by the polite attendance on you, wherever you go, of a mysterious gentleman in black; but you feel yourself, nevertheless, perpetually "_en surveillance_," and constrained either to sail with the stream, or to adopt a reserve and reticence which, to an Englishman, is almost as irksome as the knowledge that there is a spy sitting at the same dinner-table with him. The spirit of Professor Johnston's strictures on such anomalies will, of course, insure his being set down by his democratic friends in America as an unmitigated "old hunker;" and he certainly shows no great liking for practical republicanism. But to find fault with our neighbours' arrangements, and to be contented with our own, are two very different things; and, accordingly, our author takes many opportunities, as he goes along, of showing that he is quite aware of the innumerable rents in our own old battered tea-kettle of a constitution, and of the infinite tinkering it will take to make it hold water. We should have held him unworthy of the character of a true Briton if he had omitted the occasion of a grumble at our system of taxation, though, of course, we differ with him entirely in the view he takes of the evil. After an elaborate comparison of the taxation in the United States with that of Great Britain, he sums up all with the following somewhat sententious apophthegm:-- "The great contrast between the two sections of the Anglo-Saxon race on the opposite sides of the Atlantic is this--_On the one side the masses rule and property pays; on the other side property rules and the masses pay_."--(Vol. ii. 254.)