Dunscomb returned to town that evening, leaving Anna Updyke behind him, ostensibly under the care of Mrs. Gott. Democracy has been carried so far on the high road of ultraism in New York, as in very many interests to become the victim of its own expedients. Perhaps the people are never so far from exercising a healthful, or indeed, any authority at all, as when made to seem, by the expedients of demagogues, to possess an absolute control. It is necessary merely to bestow a power which it is impossible for the masses to wield with intelligence, in order to effect this little piece of legerdemain in politics, the quasi people in all such cases becoming the passive instruments in the hands of their leaders, who strengthen their own authority by this seeming support of the majority. In all cases, however, in which the agency of numbers can be felt, its force is made to prevail, the tendency necessarily being to bring down all representation to the level of the majority. The effect of the change has been pretty equally divided between good and evil. In many cases benefits have accrued to the community by the exercise of this direct popular control, while in probably quite as many the result has been exactly the reverse of that which was anticipated. In no one instance, we believe it will be generally admitted, has the departure from the old practice been less advantageous than in rendering the office of sheriff elective. Instead of being a leading and independent man, who has a pride in his position, and regards the character of his county as he does his own, this functionary has got to be, nine times in ten, a mere political manœuvrer, who seeks the place as a reward for party labours, and fills it very much for his personal benefit, conferring no dignity on it by his own position and character, lessening its authority by his want of the qualities calculated to increase it, and, in a good many instances, making it quite as difficult to wrest money from _his_ hands, as from those of the original debtor. It is a consequence of this state of things that the sheriff has quite lost all, or nearly all of the personal consideration that was once connected with his office; and has sunk, in most of the strictly rural counties, into a gaoler, and the head of the active bailiffs. His object is altogether money; and the profit connected with the keeping of the prisoners, now reduced almost entirely to felons, the accused, and persons committed for misdemeanors, is one of the inducements for aspiring to an office once so honourable.