The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 36, October, 1860 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 310 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 36, October, 1860.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 36, October, 1860 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 310 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 36, October, 1860.

Meanwhile the only point in which voters are interested is,—­What do they mean by the Constitution?  Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority of a certain exceptional species of property over all others, nay, over man himself.  Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it, means practically the same thing.  Both of them mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect,—­that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity.  Both of them represent not merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish ones of a caste.  Both of them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency may seem to require; but since both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we have little difficulty in divining what their course would be after the fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected.  We know too well what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces which each shows by turns under the same hood.  Everybody remembers Baron Grimm’s story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the royal Bengal tiger under the new character of national, as more in harmony with the changed order of things.  Could the animal have lived till 1848, he would probably have found himself offered to the discriminating public as the democratic and social ornament of the jungle.  The Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor under even more frequent and incongruous aliases; it is now national, now conservative, now constitutional; here it represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged, and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive.  Mr. Lincoln’s position is set forth with sufficient precision in the platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make of Messrs. Bell and Everett?  Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them? or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Pere la Chaise, who, with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth’s gravestone to advertise that they still carry on the business at the old stand?  Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us only a string of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and Mr. Bell preserves a silence singularly at variance with his patronymic.  The only public demonstration of principle that we have seen is an emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as it moves along.  Are all the figures in this melancholy procession equally emblematic?  If so, which of the two candidates is typified in the unfortunate who leads the horse?—­for we believe the

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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 36, October, 1860 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.