We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are useful and handy, and we cannot do without them.  They rivet, they forge, they coin, they “fire up,” “brake up,” “switch off,” “prospect,” “shin” for us when we are “short,” “post up” our books, and finally ourselves, “strike a lead,” “follow a trail,” “stand up to the rack,” “dicker,” “swap,” and “peddle.”  They are “whole teams” beside the “one-horse” vapidities which fail to bear our burdens.  The Norman cannot keep down the Saxon.  The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade.  Now “Mose” brings his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides from the hamlets of the Kennebec.

We declare for the proletaires.  We vote the working-words ticket.  We have to plead the cause of American idioms.  Some of them have, as we said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are “new men,” born under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors.  And before we go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the two tongues.

A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court.  The plaintiff’s counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was “prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would precipitate him into the river.”  The evidence showed that the captain called out,—­“Stranger, ef you don’t tote your plunder off that gang-plank, I’ll spill you in the drink.”

We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at the address.

The illustration will serve our turn.  It points to a class of phrases which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance.  And these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue.  Of them is the large family of political phrases.  These are coined in moments of intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their shirt-sleeves.  Every campaign gives us a new horde.  Some die out at once; others felicitously tickle the public ear and ring far and wide.  They “speak for Buncombe,” are Barn-Burners, Old Hunkers, Hard Shells, Soft Shells, Log-Rollers, Pipe-Layers, Woolly Heads, Silver Grays, Locofocos, Fire-Eaters, Adamantines, Free Soilers, Freedom Shriekers, Border Ruffians.  They spring from a bon-mot or a retort.  The log-cabin and hard-cider watchwords were born of a taunt, like the “Gueux” of the Netherlands.  The once famous phrase, Gerrymandering, some of our readers may remember.  Governor Elbridge Gerry contrived,