Mr. Buchanan, by his training in a system of politics without a parallel for intrigue, personality, and partisanship, would have unfitted himself for taking a statesmanlike view of anything, even if he had ever been capable of it.  His nature has been subdued to what it worked in.  We could not have expected from him a Message around which the spirit, the intelligence, and the character of the country would have rallied.  But he might have saved himself from the evil fame of being the first of our Presidents who could never forget himself into a feeling of the dignity of the place he occupied.  He has always seemed to consider the Presidency as a retaining-fee paid him by the slavery-propagandists, and his Message to the present Congress looks like the last juiceless squeeze of the orange which the South is tossing contemptuously away.

Mr. Buchanan admits as real the assumed wrongs of the South Carolina revolutionists, and even, if we understand him, allows that they are great enough to justify revolution.  But he advises the secessionists to pause and try what can be done by negotiation.  He sees in the internal history of the country only a series of injuries inflicted by the Free upon the Slave States; yet he affirms, that, so far as Federal legislation is concerned, the rights of the South have never been assailed, except in the single instance of the Missouri Compromise, which gave to Slavery the unqualified possession of territory which the Free States might till then have disputed.  Yet that bargain, a losing one as it was on the part of the Free States, having been annulled, can hardly be reckoned a present grievance.  South Carolina had quite as long a list of intolerable oppressions to resent in 1832 as now, and not one of them, as a ground of complaint, could be compared with the refusal to pay the French-Spoliation claims of Massachusetts.  The secession movement then, as now, had its origin in the ambition of disappointed politicians.  If its present leaders are more numerous, none of them are so able as Mr. Calhoun; and if it has now any other object than it had then, it is to win by intimidation advantages that shall more than compensate for its loss in the elections.

In 1832, General Jackson bluntly called the South Carolina doctrines treason, and the country sustained him.  That they are not characterized in the same way now does not prove any difference in the thing, but only in the times and the men.  They are none the less treason because James Buchanan is less than Andrew Jackson, but they are all the more dangerous.

It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards.  A general skepticism has thus been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times