In regard to public life, and the influence of this rough manliness in politics, it is a matter of daily observation, that, in the strife of parties and principles, backbone without brain will carry it against brain without backbone. A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You cannot, by tying an opinion to a man's tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the wounded, but among the missing. The true motto for a party is neither "Measures, not men," nor "Men, not measures," but "Measures _in_ men,"--measures which are in their blood as well as in their brain and on their lips. Wellington said that Napoleon's presence in the French army was equivalent to forty thousand additional soldiers; and in a legislative assembly, Mirabeau and John Adams and John Quincy Adams are not simply persons who hold a single vote, but forces whose power thrills through the whole mass of voters. Mean natures always feel a sort of terror before great natures; and many a base thought has been unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld, through the fear inspired by the rebuking presence of one noble man. Opinions embodied in men, and thus made aggressive and militant, are the opinions which mark the union of thought with grit. A politician of this class is not content to comprehend and wield the elements of power already existing in a community, but he aims to make his individual conviction and purpose dominant over the convictions and purposes of the accredited exponents of public opinion. He cares little about his unpopularity at the start, and doggedly persists in his course against obstacles which seem insurmountable. A great, but mischievous, example of this power appeared in our own generation in the person of Mr. Calhoun, a statesman who stamped his individual mind on the policy and thinking of the country more definitely, perhaps, than any statesman since Hamilton, though his influence has, on the whole, been as evil as Hamilton's was, on the whole, beneficent. Keen-sighted, far-sighted, and inflexible, Mr. Calhoun clearly saw the logical foundations and logical results of the institution of Slavery; and though at first called an abstractionist and a fanatic by the looser thinkers of his own region, his inexorable argumentation, conquering by degrees politicians who could reason, made itself felt at last among politicians who could not reason; and the conclusions of his logic were adopted by thousands whose brains would have broken in the attempt to follow its processes. One of those rare deductive reasoners whose audacity marches abreast their genius, he would have been willing to fight to the last gasp for a conclusion which he had laboriously reached by rigid deduction through a score of intermediate steps, from premises in themselves repugnant to