Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in principle; and, better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words:  “The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the head and the heart.”  The first branch of the figure—­that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel—­I admit is not merely figuratively, but literally true.  Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of “running itch”?  It seems that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner:  which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away.  At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too strikingly in point to be omitted.  A witty Irish soldier, who was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied:  “Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but, somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.”  So with Mr. Lamborn’s party.  They take the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally “vulnerable heels” will run away with them.

Seriously this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less than a request that his party may be tried by their professions instead of their practices.  Perhaps no position that the party assumes is more liable to or more deserving of exposure than this very modest request; and nothing but the unwarrantable length to which I have already extended these remarks forbids me now attempting to expose it.  For the reason given, I pass it by.

I shall advert to but one more point.  Mr. Lamborn refers to the late elections in the States, and from their results confidently predicts that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next Presidential election.  Address that argument to cowards and to knaves; with the free and the brave it will effect nothing.  It may be true; if it must, let it.  Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.  I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and