No Northern statesman.
The great want of the North at the present time is a statesman, one who has the sagacity to discover the true interests of his country and the ability and nerve to follow that end without regard to personal aggrandizement or popular clamor. Indeed, that has been the want of the old Republic for many years, and is perhaps a defect common to Republics.--Great men, with ample qualifications to guide the ship of State, are as common in free as in monarchical Governments; but, unfortunately, they are not as sure of receiving the just reward of their labors. The populace is more fickle than a king, and more easily imposed upon in the selection of its counsellors. We find the monarchs of Europe, both absolute and limited, able to command in their Cabinets the best talent of their empires, whereas, it is many years since the best talent of America controlled the Administration of the Government. It is a long time since a man of first late intellect could be elected President of the United States. It became the custom to choose some unknown man for that purpose, with the well understood design of making him a tool of party, a more agent of the political establishment by which he had been placed in power, and this, for the base and sordid purpose of securing the public revenue so as to distribute it entirely among the train hands of the successful party. The late Mr. Marcy, who, when Judge of the Supreme Court of New York, charged that State fifty cents for the cost of a patch in his breeches, condensed in one pithy line the wholes aim, spirit and character of American party politics; ‘"To the victors belong the spoils."’ Mr. Marcy never heard the last of that ingenious confession, but, whatever may be thought of his discretion in making such an avowal, it was the principle upon which all parties acted,--those who denounced Mr. Marcy quite as much as his political friends. Abraham Lincoln is only at the present moment attempting a more extended and literal application of this principle. He was elected to the Presidency simply as the representative of a sectional party, and he has carried on the Government from the beginning with exclusive reference to the will and interests of party, and not of the country. All the offices were given to men of his own section, and all the spoils of the war now waging are to be parcelled out among his chiefs. The State sovereignties are to be swamped, and our very farms to be divided among his legions, it successful. Not only this, but every Southern fireside was to be degraded, and every Southern patriot swung from the gallows. Our accursed race was to be exterminated, and the new and holy seed of the Pilgrims substituted in its place. What a comment upon the ferocity and wickedness of party spirit, among a people claiming to be the most free, and civilized, and Christian people upon the face of the earth ! Did ever any king that ever sat upon a throne, any despot of ancient or modern times, begin a war with such inhuman, barbarous and devilish purposes, as those ferociously and repeatedly proclaimed by the free press of the ‘"free North,"’ and which they have only been prevented from executing by the universal ‘"Shame ! Shame !"’ which arose from all Christendom, and by the stern and powerful front with which the South instantly faced her brutal and braggart foe?We need not be surprised, then, that Wm. H. Seward is the nearest approach to a statesman that such a people can produce. He is a man of education, and in that respect has the advantage of Lincoln and some of his colleagues; but his history proves that he is, like all the rest of the United States Cabinet, a cultivated demagogue, and nothing more. In many respects he resembles Martin Van Buren, of his own State, having the same unscrupulous cunning, the same scheming, wire-working, partisan character; the same supple conscience; the same narrowness of aim, and the same cold, imperturbable temperament.--Each of these men began his political career and continued it by pandering to the base passions of the ignorant and degraded; Martin Van Buren fomenting the anti-rent disturbances in Columbia county, and Seward bestriding the hobby of anti-Masonry. Abolitionism has also been used by both men simply and exclusively as a political instrument. It is a well known fact that Wm. H. Seward, when in the Senate of the United States, after a speech most earnest and pointed in its denunciation of Southern institutions, has been asked whether he really entertained such sentiments as those announced in his speech, and that he replied, with a laugh, ‘"No; I only used them for party effect."’ Can such a person be called a statesman? Does he deserve the name of gentleman? And yet he is, at this moment, the North. He is the Palinurus of their ship of state in this darkest night and stormiest sea that ever vexed the soul of mariner. Yet he has himself engendered the darkness and evoked the storm. Who expects him to take his country safe through the evils he has brought upon her? Who believes that he is as capable of building up as of pulling down? Who imagines that he sees his way at this moment one inch before his nose? Five months ago he announced, with the air of an oracle, that in sixty days all the troubles of the country would be at an end.
The result shows that he has not the most ordinary sagacity. He did not pretend to give a reason for the prediction, and, in making it, prove himself a more mouthing pretender. Yet it is on such a man as this that the North relies to take it safely and triumphantly through such an exigency as the present ! If he had been a statesman he would have pursued at the beginning of these troubles the course of a Webster or a Clay. He would have poured oil on the troubled waters; he would have applied emollients instead of irritants to the inflamed passions of the people. This would at least have deferred the evil day. But he did not comprehend intelligently the interests of his own section. He did not perceive that delay of an open rupture must continue to add to Northern strength and to Southern weakness. He could not understand that such a proclamation as that of Lincoln would divide the country forever, and eternally ruin Northern trade and manufactures. Happy is it for the South that Wm. H. Seward is the Primacy of Lincoln's Administration, sad that this fatal blunderer is its main reliance for carrying on the present war. The time will come when this can section wild repudiate and denounce him as the worst enemy of that Union which was so profitable to it, and as the chief architect of its rain.
