The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself.  Fools and dead men are the only people who never change their opinions or their course of action.  The course of great statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal barriers of both.  It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men,—­and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism to the inevitable.  But we demand also that they shall not too lightly accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of change that is suspicious because it is sudden,—­and detrimental to the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest.  We hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him, —­that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves.  It is this kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, Patibulum inter et statuam quam leve discrimen!

It is not for inconsistencies of policy in matters of indifference that we should blame a mart or a party, but for making questions of honor and morals matters of indifference.  Inconsistency is to be settled, not by seeming discrepancies between the action of one day and that of the next, but by the experience which enables us to judge of motives and impulses.  Time, which reconciles apparent contradictions, impeaches real ones, and shows a malicious satirical turn, in forcing men into positions where they must break their own necks in attempting to face both ways.  Nor is it for inconsistency that we condemn the Democratic Party.  There are no trade-winds for the Ship of State, unless it be navigated by higher principles than any the political meteorologists have yet discovered.