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.