Had a constituent of Mr. Cushing, in the Essex North District, taken a nap of twenty years,—­(and if he had invited his Representative to dinner, and got such an answer as the Craytonville letter, the supposition is not extravagant,)—­what would have been his amazement, on waking, to find his Member of Congress haranguing an assembly of Original Democrats in Tammany Hall!  Caius Marcius addressing the Volscian council of war would occur to him as the only historic parallel for such a rhetorical phenomenon.  The one was an ideal, as the other is a commonplace example of the ludicrous contradictions in which men may be involved, who find in personal motives the justification of public conduct.  That the chairman of the meeting should have had in his pocket a letter from the candidate of the Buffalo Convention, and that Mr. John Van Buren should have sat upon the platform, while the orator charged the leaders of the Republican Party with interested motives, were merely two of those incidental circumstances by which Fact always vindicates her claim to be more satiric than Fiction.  But when Mr. Cushing speaks with exultation of the past and with confidence of the future of the Original Democratic Party, we can think of nothing like it but Charles II. taking the Solemn League and Covenant, with an unctuous allusion to the persecutions WE Covenanters have undergone, and the triumphs of vital piety to which WE look forward.

Mr. Cushing claims that the Democratic Party has originated and carried through every measure that has become a part of the settled policy of the government.  This is not very remarkable, if we consider that the party has been in power during by far the greater part of our national existence, and that under our system the administration is practically a dictatorship for four years.  Mr. Everett long ago pointed out the advantage we should gain by having a responsible ministry.  As it is, the representative branch of our government is practically a nullity.  What with his immense patronage, the progress of events, and the chance of luring the opposing party into by-questions, the Presidential Micawber of the moment is almost sure that something will turn up to extricate him from the consequences of his own incompetency or dishonesty.  The only check upon this system is the chance that the temerity engendered by irresponsible power may lead the executive to measures which, as in the case of Kansas, shall open the eyes of thinking men to the real designs and objects of those in office.  An opposition is necessarily transitory in its nature, if it be not founded on some principle which, reaching below the shifting sands of politics, rests upon the primary rock of morals and conscience.  In such a principle only is found the nucleus of a party which the adverse patronage of a corrupt executive can but strengthen by attracting from it its baser elements.  Such an opposition the Democratic Party seems lately to have devoted all its policy to build up, and now, confronted with it, can find no remedy but in the abolishment of morals and conscience altogether.