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 Providential 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 by it, that we demand in public men,—and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of change that is suspicious because it is sudden,—and detrimental to the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest. We hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him, —that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves. It is this kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, Patibulum inter et statuam quàm leve discrimen!
It is not for inconsistencies of policy in matters of indifference that we should blame a mart or a party, but for making questions of honor and morals matters of indifference. Inconsistency is to be settled, not by seeming discrepancies between the action of one day and that of the next, but by the experience which enables us to judge of motives and impulses. Time, which reconciles apparent contradictions, impeaches real ones, and shows a malicious satirical turn, in forcing men into positions where they must break their own necks in attempting to face both ways. Nor is it for inconsistency that we condemn the Democratic Party. There are no trade-winds for the Ship of State, unless it be navigated by higher principles than any the political meteorologists have yet discovered. But there have been mysterious movements, of late, which raise a violent presumption that our Democratic captain and officers are altering the rig and adapting the hold of the vessel to suit the demands of a traffic condemned by the whole civilized world. They are painting out the old name, letter by letter, and putting "Conservative" in its stead. They seem to fancy there is such a thing as a slave-trade-wind, and are attempting to beat up against what they profess to believe a local current and a gust of popular delusion. We think they are destined to find that they are striving against the invincible drift of Humanity and the elemental breath of God. It is an ominous consistency with which we charge the Democratic Party.
Mr. Cushing affirms, that the Republicans have no argument but the "cry of Slavepower!"—which is as eloquent a one as the old Roman's Delenda est Carthago, to those who know how many years of bitter experience, how many memories of danger and forebodings of aggression, are compressed in it. But he is mistaken; Democratic administrations have been busy in supplying arguments, and we complain rather of their abundance than their paucity. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas policy, which even office-holders who had gulped their own professions found too nauseous to swallow, and the Dred Scott decision,—if these be not arguments, then history is no teacher, and events have no logic.
Mr. Cushing adroitly evades the real matter in issue, and assumes that it is a mere question of the relative amount of federal office secured by the North and the South respectively. This may be a very natural view of the case in a man whose map of nationality would seem to be bounded North by a seat in Congress, East by a Chinese Embassy, West by an Attorney-Generalship, and South by the vague line of future contingency; but it hardly solves the difficulty. With characteristic pluck he takes the wolf by the ears. The charge being, that the power of the Slave States has been gaining a steady preponderance over that of the Free States by means of the federal administration, he answers it by saying that he has made it a subject of "philosophic study," and has found that Massachusetts has had a "pretty fair run of the power of the Union,"—whatever that may be. The phrase is unfortunate, for it reminds one too much of the handsome competence with which a father once claimed to have endowed his son in giving him the run of the streets since he was able to go alone. But let us test Mr. Cushing's logic by an equivalent proposition. He is executor, we will suppose, of an estate to be divided among sixteen heirs; he pays A his portion, and claims a discharge in full. What would not Mr. Buchanan give for a receipt by which office-seekers could be so cheaply satisfied!
"Philosophic study," to be sure! It may be easy for gentlemen, the chief part of whose productive industry has been the holding of office or the preparing of their convictions for the receipt of more, to be philosophic; but it is not so easy for Massachusetts to be satisfied, when she sees only those of her children so rewarded who misrepresent her long-cherished principles, who oppose the spread of her institutions, who mock at her sense of right and her hereditary love of freedom, and are willing to accept place as an equivalent for the loss of her confidence. The question, Who is in office? may be of primary importance to Mr. Cushing, but is of little consequence to the Free States. What concerns them is, How and in what interest are the offices administered? If to the detriment of free institutions, then all the worse that sons of theirs can be found to do that part of the work which involves (as affairs are now tending) something very like personal dishonor. It is no matter of pride to us that the South has never been able to produce a sailor skilful enough and bold enough to take command of a slaver.
Mr. Cushing affects to see in the history of the Slavery Agitation nothing but a series of injuries inflicted by the North on the South. He charges "some of the Northern States" with acts of aggression upon the South "which would have been just cause of war as between foreign governments." He prudently forbears to name any. Does he mean, that persons have been found in some of those States unnational enough, un-Original-Democratic enough, to give a cup of water to a hunted Christian woman, or to harbor an outcast Christian man, without first submitting their hair to a microscopic examination? Does he mean, that we have said hard things of our Southern brethren? Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" is open to them as well as to us, and the Richmond "South" is surely not in the habit of sprinkling the Northern subjects of its animadversion with rose-water. No,—what Mr. Cushing means is this,—that there are men at the North who will not surrender the principles they have inherited from three revolutions because they are threatened with a fourth that will never come,—who do not consider it an adequate success in our experiment of self-government that we can produce such types of nationality as reckon the value of their country by the amount of salary she pays,—who will not believe that there is no higher kind of patriotism than complicity in every violent measure of an administration which redeems only its pledges to a faction of Southern disunionists,—who will not admit that slave-holding is the only important branch of national industry, because the profession of that dogma enables unscrupulous men to enter the public service poor and to leave it rich. Has any citizen of a Southern State ever failed to obtain justice (that is to say, in the language of Original Democracy, his nigger) in a Northern court? Has Massachusetts ever mobbed an envoy or brutally assaulted a Senator of South Carolina? Has any Northern State ever nullified an article of the Federal Constitution, as every seaboard Slave-State has always done in respect to the colored citizens of the North? When a man's allowing himself to be kicked comes to be reckoned an outrage on the kicker, then Mr. Cushing's notion of what constitutes a "just cause of war" will deserve as much consideration as Mr. G.T. Curtis's theory that hustling a deputy-marshal is "levying" it. We can remember when the confirmation of an ambassador to England (where the eminent fitness of the nomination was universally conceded) was opposed by several Southern Senators on the ground that he had expressed an interest in the success of West India emancipation. If Original Democrats have their way, it will not be long before it is made constructive treason to have read that chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which relates the misguided philanthropy of Philip in endeavoring to convert an Ethiopian into anything but a chattel.
We are inclined to think that a too amiable willingness to be kicked has been generally considered "just cause of war as between foreign governments,"—especially on the part of the stronger of the two. History seems to show this,—and also, that the sooner a nation gets over its eccentric partiality for this kind of appeal to its reasoning faculty, the more likely it is to avoid the risks of war. At any rate, the forbearance of the South has been such, that, in spite of the great temptation, she has hitherto refrained from sending her fleets and armies northward, and we are glad to find that Mr. Cushing is inclined to take a cheerful view of the permanency of our institutions. He tells us, it is true, in one place, that the success of the Republican Party would be "the de facto dissolution of the Union"; but in a moment of calmer reflection he assures us that there are thirty million Americans who stand ready "to devour and swallow up" the "handful of negrophilist Union-haters." We have great faith in the capacity of the American people, yet we somewhat doubt whether any one of them could swallow up what he had already devoured, unless, indeed, he performed that feat which has hitherto been the opprobrium of Jack-puddings, and jumped down his own throat afterwards. However, a man of Mr. Cushing's warmth of nature might well find himself carried beyond the regions of ordinary rhetoric in contemplating so beautiful and affecting a vision, and it is enough that we have the consolation of knowing that he either spoke with a disregard of the census, which we cannot believe possible in one so remarkable for accuracy of statement, or that he acquits every man, woman, and child in the country of any hostility to the Union. It is cheering to have this matter set finally at rest by so eminent an authority, and we are particularly glad that the necessity for so painful an experiment in swallowing is a great way off; for, though a "handful" would not go far among so many, yet, if its components be as unpleasant as Mr. Cushing represents them, it would certainly give a colic to every patriot who got a bite. After so generous an exculpation of the American people from any desire to pull their own house about their ears, we are left to conclude that the only real danger to be apprehended, in case of a Republican success, is a de facto and de jure dissolution of that union between certain placemen and their places which has lasted so long that they have come to look on it as something Constitutional. When that day is likely to arrive, we shall see such samples of consistency, and such instances of stable conviction, in finding out on which side of their bread the butter lies, as cannot fail to gratify even Mr. Cushing himself.