of territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping
at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions,
will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our
buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners. The instinct of
the people is right. Men expect from good whigs, put into office by the
respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico,
Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members, than from some
strong transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first conquers his
own government, and then uses the same genius to conquer the foreigner.
The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk’s Mexican war, were not those
who knew better, but those who, from political position, could afford
it; not Webster, but Benton and Calhoun.
This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. ’Tis the power of Lynch
law, of soldiers and pirates; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal.
But it brings its own antidote; and here is my point,—that all kinds of
power usually emerge at the same time; good energy, and bad; power of
mind, with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion, with the
exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only
sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday
foreground, being to-day background,—what was surface, playing now a not
less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts, the more is
the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the
sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And, in morals, wild
liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great
resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will
be whigs; whilst red republicanism, in the father, is a spasm of nature
to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand,
conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and
drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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