alarm of the mercantile and commercial interest, then a growing indifference to the very features of the project which had caused the early apprehension, and lastly the meek and cowardly acquiescence in the enacted outrage? Would not these arch-conspirators North and South have been wilfully blind, if they had not seen not only that the nation was sinking in the scale of public virtue, but that it had acquired "a strange alacrity in sinking"? Meanwhile they had learned a lesson, the value and significance of which they fully appreciated. He must have been an inattentive student of our political history, who has not observed that the successful prosecution of any political enterprise has too often dignified its author in the eyes of the people, in spite of its intrinsic iniquity. The party reaping the benefit of the measure has not withheld the expected reward, and the originator and abettors of the accomplished wrong have found that exalted official position covers a multitude of sins. Wisely availing themselves of this national weakness, and most adroitly using all the elements of political power with which long practice had made them familiar, the leaders of the Democratic party had every reason to believe that the duration of their political supremacy would be coeval with the life of the Republic. In fact, the peril predicted more than twenty years ago, by one of the purest and wisest men whom this country has ever seen, with a sagacity which, in the light of subsequent events, seems almost inspired, had wellnigh become an historical fact. "The great danger to our institutions," said Dr. Channing, writing to a friend in 1841, "is of a party organization so subtle and strong as to make the Government the monopoly of a few leaders, and to insure the transmission of the executive power from hand to hand almost as regularly as in a monarchy."