faith in the early principles and practice of the Republic, a common persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of the one, has been the chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve to resist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere.  They see no reason to fear that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years’ proslavery pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again gently to its original rectitude of fibre.  “All forms of human government,” says Machiavelli, “have, like men, their natural term, and those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of returning to the principles on which they were originally founded.”  It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies.  They believe as everybody believed sixty years ago; and we are sorry to see what appears to be an inclination in some quarters to blink this aspect of the case, lest the party be charged with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with abolitionism.  It is and will be charged with all kinds of dreadful things, whatever it does, and it has nothing to fear from an upright and downright declaration of its faith.  One part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but submission,—­from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism.  A question which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement.  Such excitement is healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless.  It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative.  The vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead formula on men’s lips and the dry topic of the annalist.  It has been our good fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has forced us to reconsider the primal principles of government, which has appealed to conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our thought and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory into a conviction of the understanding and the soul.  It will not do for the Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument, for the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of Right and Wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position.  What Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party-platforms,—­that those are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.