of our national existence, and that under our system the administration is practically a dictatorship for four years. Mr. Everett long ago pointed out the advantage we should gain by having a responsible ministry. As it is, the representative branch of our government is practically a nullity. What with his immense patronage, the progress of events, and the chance of luring the opposing party into by-questions, the Presidential Micawber of the moment is almost sure that something will turn up to extricate him from the consequences of his own incompetency or dishonesty. The only check upon this system is the chance that the temerity engendered by irresponsible power may lead the executive to measures which, as in the case of Kansas, shall open the eyes of thinking men to the real designs and objects of those in office. An opposition is necessarily transitory in its nature, if it be not founded on some principle which, reaching below the shifting sands of politics, rests upon the primary rock of morals and conscience. In such a principle only is found the nucleus of a party which the adverse patronage of a corrupt executive can but strengthen by attracting from it its baser elements. Such an opposition the Democratic Party seems lately to have devoted all its policy to build up, and now, confronted with it, can find no remedy but in the abolishment of morals and conscience altogether.
The Democratic Party, like the distinguished ancestor of Jonathan Wild, has been impartially on both sides of every question of domestic policy which has arisen since it came into political existence. It has been pro and con in regard to a Navy, a National Bank, Internal Improvements, Protection, Hard Money, and Missouri Compromise. Its leading doctrine was State Rights; its whole course of action, culminating in the Dred Scott decision, has been in the direction of Centralization. During all these changes, it has contrived to have the Constitution always on its side by the simple application of Swift's axiom, "Orthodoxy is my doxy, Heterodoxy is thy doxy," though it has had as many doxies as Cowley. Sometimes it has even had two at once, as in refusing to the iron of Pennsylvania the protection it gave to the sugar of Louisiana. Pennsylvania avenged herself by the fatal gift of Mr. Buchanan. There is one exception to the amiable impartiality of the party,—it has been always and energetically pro-slavery. In this respect Mr. Cushing has the advantage of it, for he has been on both sides of the Slavery question also. It must be granted, however, that his lapse into Negrophilism was but a momentary weakness, and that without it the Whig Party would have lost the advantage of his character, and the lesson of his desertion, in Congress. He is said to be master of several tongues, and it is therefore quite natural that he should have held a different language at different times on many different questions.
A creed so various that it seemed to be, not one, but every creed's epitome, could not fail to be strangely attractive to a mind so versatile as that of Mr. Cushing; yet we cannot deny to his conversion some remarkable features which give it a peculiar interest. In some respects his case offers a pleasing contrast to that of the Rev. John Newton; for, as the latter was converted from slave-trading to Christianity, so Mr. Cushing (whatever he may have renounced) seems to have embraced something very like the principles which the friend of Cowper abandoned,—another example of the beautiful compensations by which the balance of Nature is preserved. And his conversion was sudden enough to have pleased even Jonathan Edwards himself. Up to the ripe age of forty-two he had been joined to his idols. It is a proverb, that he who is a fool at forty will be a fool at fourscore; yet Mr. Cushing, who is certainly no fool, had been blind to the beauties of Original Democracy for a year or two beyond that alliterative era. The Whigs had just succeeded in electing their candidates, and it seemed as if nothing short of an almost Prov-
