idential interposition could save him. That interposition came in the death of General Harrison, which took away the last earthly hope of Whig advancement. It was what the jockeys call "a very near thing." But for that,—it is a sad thought,—Mr. Cushing might have been on our side now. This was the gratia operans. Mr. Tyler, who succeeded to the Presidency, had Democratic proclivities; this was the gratia coöperans; and finally we see the gratia perficiens in the appointment of our catechumen to the Chinese Commissionership. From the Central Flowery Kingdom he returned a full-blown Original Democrat. In 1853, Mr. Pierce, finding himself elected President for no other reason apparently than that he had failed to distinguish himself in the Mexican War, appointed Mr. Cushing his Attorney General on the same benevolent principle,—consoling him for having to sheathe a bloodless sword by giving him a chance to draw the more dangerous Opinion.
We have alluded only to such facts in Mr. Cushing's history as are fresh in the remembrance of our readers; and it would not have been worth our while to allude even to these, if he had not seen fit to speak of the leading men of the Republican Party as "dangerous, because they have no fixed principle, no stable convictions, no samples of consistency to control their acts; because their only creed is what has been called the duty of success; and because their success—the successful accomplishment of a sectional organization of the government on the ruins of its nationality—would be the de facto dissolution of the Union." In his Letter he says also, that "it is a fact humiliating to confess that the cant of negroism still has vogue as one of the minor instruments of demagoguy in Northern States." The coolness of such charges, coming from Mr. Cushing, is below the freezing-point of quicksilver. Shall we take lessons in fixedness of principle from the Whig-Antislavery Member from Federalist Essex?—in stable convictions from the Tyler-Commissioner to China?—in consistency from the Democratic Attorney-General?—in an amalgam of all three from the Coalition Judge? Shall we find a more pointed warning of the worthlessness of success in the words than in the example of the orator? Since Reynard the Fox donned a friar's hood, and, with the feathers still sticking in his whiskers, preached against the damnable heresy of hen-stealing, there has been nothing like this!
In China, they set great store by porcelain that has been often broken and mended again with silver wire, prizing it more highly than that which is sound and fresh from the hands of the potter. There is a kind of political character of the same description,—hollow-ware, not generally porcelain, indeed,—cracked in every direction, but deftly bound together with silver strips of preferment, till it is consistent enough to serve all the need of its possessor in receiving large messes of the public pottage. How the Chinese would have admired Mr. Tyler's Commissioner, if they had known the exquisite perfection of crackle displayed in his political career! To be sure, the Chinese are our antipodes.
The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. Fools and dead men are the only people who never change their opinions or their course of action. The course of great statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not to be carried away
