of our public men, that the people wanted doctors of the body-politic to rule over them, and, if those were not to be had, would put up with the next best thing,--quacks. Every one who was willing to be an Eminent Statesman issued his circulars, like the Retired Physician, on all public occasions, offering to send his recipe in return for a vote. The cabalistic formula always turned out to be this:--"Take your humble servant for four years at the White House; if no cure is effected, repeat the dose."
Meanwhile were there any symptoms of disease in the Constitution? Not the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear that the alarmists might create the disease which they kept up so much excitement about.
This being the posture of affairs, the city of Boston, a twelvemonth since, chose for their annual orator a clergyman distinguished for eloquence, and for that important part of patriotism, at least, which consists in purity of life. This gentleman, being neither a candidate for office nor the canvasser of a candidate, ventured upon a new kind of address. He took for his theme the duties consequent upon the privileges of Freedom, ventured to mention self-respect as one of them, and commented upon the invitation of a Virginia Senator, the author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, to a Seventeenth-of-June Celebration, while the Senators of Massachusetts were neglected. In speaking of this, he used, we believe, the word "flunkeyism." It is not an elegant word; it is not even an English one;--but had the speaker sought for a Saxon correlative, he could hardly have found one that would have seemed more satisfactory, especially to those who deserved it; for Saxon is straightforward, and a reluctance to be classified (fatal to science) is characteristic of the human animal.
An orator who suggests a new view of any topic is a disturber of the digestive organs,--this was very properly a matter of offence to the Aldermen who were to dine after the oration,--but an orator who tampers with the language we have inherited from Shakspeare and Milton, and which we share with Tupper, was an object for deeper reprobation. The Young Men's Democratic Association of Boston are purists; they are jealous for their mother-tongue,--and it is the more disinterested in them as a large proportion of them are Irishmen; they are exclusive,--a generous confusion of ideas as to the meaning of democracy, even more characteristically Hibernian; they are sentimental, too,--melancholy as gibcats,--and feared (from last year's example) that the city might not furnish them with a sufficiently lachrymose Antony to hold up before them the bloody garment of America, and show what rents the envious Blairs and Wilsons and Douglasses had made in it. Accordingly they resolved to have a public celebration all to themselves,--a pocket-edition of the cumbrous civic work,--and as the city provided fireworks in the evening, in order to be beforehand with it in their pyrotechnics, they gave Mr. Choate in the forenoon.
We did not hear Mr. Choate's oration; we only read it in the newspapers. Cold fireworks, the morning after, are not enlivening. You have the form without the fire, and the stick without the soar. But we soon found that we were to expect no such disappointment from Mr. Choate. He seems to announce at the outset that he has closed his laboratory. The Prospero of periods had broken his wand and sunk his book deeper than ever office-hunter sounded. The boys in the street might wander fancy-free, and fire their Chinese crackers as they listed; but for him this was a solemn occasion, and he
