In these days, when everybody's correspondence is published as soon as he is dead,—or during his life, if he is unfortunate enough to be the Director of an Observatory, and there is a chance of injuring him by the breach of confidence,—we cannot help thinking that the forms we have given above are not only more compendious, but safer, than Mr. Cushing's. If his method should come into vogue, posterity would be deprived of the letters of this generation for nearly a century by the time necessary to print them, and then, allowing for the imperious intervals of sleep, would hardly contrive to get through them in less than a couple of centuries more. We leave to those who have read Mr. Cushing's reply to the Craytonville invitation the painful task of estimating the loss to the world from such a contingency. Meanwhile, the perplexing question arises,—If such be the warrior-statesman's measure of gratitude for a dinner, what would be his scale for a breakfast or a dish of tea? Cæsar announced a victory in three words; but in this respect he was very inferior to Mr. Cushing, whose style is much more copious, and who shows as remarkable talents in the command of language as the other general did in the command of troops.
On first reading Mr. Cushing's letter, its obscurity puzzled us not a little. There are passages in it that would have pleased Lycophron himself, who wished he might be hanged if anybody could understand his poem. Dilution was to be expected in a production whose author had to make three columns out of "Thank you, can't come." Even a person overrunning with the milk of human kindness, as Mr. Cushing, on so remarkable an occasion, undoubtedly was, might be pardoned for adopting the shift of dealers in the dearer vaccine article, and reinforcing his stores from a friendly pump. The expansiveness of the heart would naturally communicate itself to the diction. But, on the other hand, repeated experiments failed to detect even the most watery flavor of conviviality in the composition. The epistles of Jacob Behmen himself are not farther removed from any contamination with the delights of sense. Was this, then, a mere Baratarian banquet, a feast of reason, to which Mr. Cushing had been invited? Or did he intend to pay an indirect tribute of respect to his ancestry by sending what would produce all the hilarious effect of one of those interminable Puritan graces before meat? No, the dinner was a real dinner,—the well-known hospitality of South Carolina toward Massachusetts ambassadors forbids any other supposition,—and Mr. Cushing's letter itself, however dark in some particulars, is clear enough in renouncing every principle and practice of the founders of New England. We must find, therefore, some other reason why the Ex-Commander of the Palmetto Regiment, when the Carolinians ask the pleasure of his society, gives them instead the agreeable relaxation of a sermon,—an example which, we trust, will not prove infectious among the clergy.
It occurred to us suddenly that the next Democratic National Convention is to assemble in Charleston. It is not, therefore, too early to send in sealed proposals for the Presidency; and if this letter is Mr. Cushing's bid, we must do him the justice to say that we think nobody will be found to go lower. We doubt if it will avail him much; but the precedent of Northern politicians going South for wool and coming back shorn is so long established, that a lawyer like himself will hardly venture to take exception to it. Like his great namesake, the son of Jephunneh, he may bring back a gigantic bunch of grapes from this land of large promise and small fulfilment, but we fear they will be of the variety which sets the teeth on edge, and fills the belly with that east wind which might have been had cheaper at home.
If, nevertheless, Mr. Cushing is desirous of being a candidate, it is worth while to consider what would be the principles on which he would administer the government, and what are his claims to the confidence of the public. We are beginning to discover that the personal character of the President has a great deal to do with the conduct of the almost irresponsible executive head of the Republic. What, then, have been Mr. Cushing's political antecedents, and what is his present creed?
There are many points of resemblance between his character and career and those of the present Chancellor of the English Exchequer. Belonging to a part of the country whose opinions are to all intents and purposes politically proscribed, he has gone over to a party whose whole policy has tended to harass the commerce, to cripple the manufactures, and to outrage the moral sense of New England, and has won advancement and prominence in that party by his talents, contriving at the same time to make his origin a service rather than a detriment. Like Mr. Disraeli, he has been consistent only in devotion to success. Like him, accomplished, handsome, plucky, industrious, and dangerous, if unconvincing, in debate, he brings to bear on every question the immediate force of personal courage and readiness, but none of that force drawn from persistent principle, whose defeats are tutorings for victory. With a quick eye for the weak point of an enemy, and a knack of so draping commonplaces with rhetoric that they shall have the momentary air of profound generalizations, he is also, like him, more cunning in expedients than capable of far-seeing policy. Adroit in creating and fostering prejudice, acute in drawing metaphysical distinctions which shall make wrong seem right by showing that it is less wrong than it appeared, he is unable to see that public opinion is never moulded by metaphysics, and that, with the people, instinct is as surely permanent as prejudice is transitory. Like Mr. Disraeli, versatile, he is liable to forget that what men admire as a grace in the intellect they condemn as a defect in the character and conduct. Gifted, like him, with various talents, he has one which overshadows all the rest,—the faculty of inspiring a universal want of confidence. As a popular leader, the advantage which daring would have given him is more than counterpoised by an acuteness and refinement of mind which have no sympathy with the mass of men, and which they in turn are likely to distrust from imperfect comprehension. Ill-adapted for the rough-and-tumble contests of a Democracy, he is admirably fitted to be the minister or the head of an oligarchical Republic. We wish all our Northern Representatives had the boldness and the abilities, we hope none of them will be seduced by the example, of Mr. Cushing.
He is one of those able men whose imputed is even greater than their real mental capacity; because the standard of ordinary men is success, —and success, of a certain kind, is assured to those mixed characters which combine the virtue of courage with the vice of unscrupulousness. An ambitious man, like Louis Napoleon, for example, who sets out with those two best gifts of worldly fortune, a lace with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it, has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom, with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the world between them, the one chose To-day and the other To-morrow.
To enable us to construct a theory of Mr. Cushing's present position, we have two recent productions in print,—his Fourth of July Oration at New York, and his Letter to the Craytonville Committee. But he has seen too many aspirants for the Presidency contrive to drown themselves in their inkstands, and is far too shrewd a man, to elaborate any documentary evidence of his opinions. If we arrive at them, it must be by a process of induction, and by gathering what evidence we can from other sources. Mr. Cushing knows very well that the multitude have nothing but a secondary office in the making of Presidents, and addresses to them only his words, while the initiated alone know what meaning to put on them. If, for example, when he says servant he means slave, when he says Negrophilist he means Republican, and when he says false philanthropy he means the fairest instincts of the human heart, we have a right to suspect that there is also an esoteric significance in the phrases, Loyalty to the Union, Nationality, and Conservatism.
Had a constituent of Mr. Cushing, in the Essex North District, taken a nap of twenty years,—(and if he had invited his Representative to dinner, and got such an answer as the Craytonville letter, the supposition is not extravagant,)—what would have been his amazement, on waking, to find his Member of Congress haranguing an assembly of Original Democrats in Tammany Hall! Caius Marcius addressing the Volscian council of war would occur to him as the only historic parallel for such a rhetorical phenomenon. The one was an ideal, as the other is a commonplace example of the ludicrous contradictions in which men may be involved, who find in personal motives the justification of public conduct. That the chairman of the meeting should have had in his pocket a letter from the candidate of the Buffalo Convention, and that Mr. John Van Buren should have sat upon the platform, while the orator charged the leaders of the Republican Party with interested motives, were merely two of those incidental circumstances by which Fact always vindicates her claim to be more satiric than Fiction. But when Mr. Cushing speaks with exultation of the past and with confidence of the future of the Original Democratic Party, we can think of nothing like it but Charles II. taking the Solemn League and Covenant, with an unctuous allusion to the persecutions WE Covenanters have undergone, and the triumphs of vital piety to which WE look forward.
Mr. Cushing claims that the Democratic Party has originated and carried through every measure that has become a part of the settled policy of the government. This is not very remarkable, if we consider that the party has been in power during by far the greater part 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.