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.