The good city of Boston in New England, for we know not how many years, had been in the habit of celebrating the National Birthday, first, with an oration, as became the Athens of America, and second, with a dinner, as was meet in the descendants of Teutonic forefathers. The forenoon's oration glorified us in the lump as a people, and every man could reckon and appropriate his own share of credit by the simple arithmetical process of dividing the last census by the value he set upon himself, a divisor easily obtained by subtracting from the total of inhabitants in his village the number of neighbors whom he considered ciphers. At the afternoon's dinner, the pudding of praise was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel of the Boston Regiment to Julius Cæsar; and everybody went home happy from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the last Z in Lemprière.
Gradually matters took a new course; the Union was suddenly supposed to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber at a convention of the Catawampusville Come-outers, or of Pyrophagus Quattlebum at a training of the Palmetto Plug-Uglies,--neither of which was skin-deep. The dinners became equally dreary. Did the eye of a speaker light on the national dish of beans, he was reminded of the languid pulse of the sentiment of union; did he see a broiled chicken, it called up to his mind's eye the bird of our uncommon country, with the gridiron on his breast, liable to be reduced at any moment to the heraldic duality of his Austrian congener by the strife of contending sections pulling in opposite directions; an innocent pippin was enough to suggest the apple of discord; and with the removal of the cloth came a dessert of diagnoses on the cancer that was supposed to be preying on the national vitals. The only variety was a cringing compliment, in which Bunker Hill curtsied to King's Mountain, to any Southern brother who chanced to be present, and who replied patronizingly,--while his compatriots at the warmer end of the Union were probably, with amiable sincerity, applying to the Yankees that epithet whose expression in type differs but little from that of a doctorate in divinity, but which precedes the name it qualifies, as that follows it, and was never, except by Beaumarchais and Fielding, reckoned among titles of honor or courtesy.
A delusion seemed to have taken possession 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 invited his hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.
We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts, with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster lived, the second advocate of our bar.
All this we concede to Mr. Choate with unreserved admiration; but when, leaving the field where he had won his spurs as the successful defender of men criminally accused, he undertakes to demonstrate the sources whence national life is drawn, and the causes which lead to its decay,--to expound authoritatively the theory of political ethics and the principles of sagacious statesmanship, wary in its steps, and therefore durable in its results,--it becomes natural and fair to ask, What has been the special training that has fitted him for the task? More than this: when he comes forward as the public prosecutor of the Republican Party, it becomes our duty to examine the force of his arguments and the soundness of his logic. Has his own experience given him any right to talk superciliously to a great party overwhelmingly triumphant in the Free States? And does his oration show him to possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a principle?
The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the world,--fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of his address. Burke, an authority whom Mr. Choate will not call in question, has said that the training of the bar tends to make the faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy--which may be summoned to the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow--is rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe, may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's school as a reasoner. As a politician, his experience has been limited. The member of a party which rarely succeeded in winning, and never in long retaining, the suffrages of the country, he for a time occupied a seat in the Senate, but without justifying the expectations of his friends. So far, his history shows nothing that can give him the right to assume so high and mighty a tone in speaking of his political opponents.