The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 6

not political, but moral,--because it is not local, but
national,--because it is not a test of party, but of individual honesty and
honor. The wrong which we allow our nation to perpetrate we cannot
localize, if we would; we cannot hem it within the limits of Washington
or Kansas; sooner or later, it will force itself into the conscience and sit
by the hearthstone of every citizen.
It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this matter of
Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of Christianity,
which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the moral
consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed after
creed and institution after institution have measured their strength and
been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to crystallize in any
sect or form, but persists, a Divinely commissioned radical and
reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new dilemma between
ease and interest on the one hand, and duty on the other. Shall it be said
that its kingdom is not of this world? In one sense, and that the highest,
it certainly is not; but just as certainly Christ never intended those
words to be used as a subterfuge by which to escape our responsibilities
in the life of business and politics. Let the cross, the sword, and the
arena answer, whether the world, that then was, so understood its first
preachers and apostles. Cæsar and Flamen both instinctively dreaded it,
not because it aimed at riches or power, but because it strove to
conquer that other world in the moral nature of mankind, where it could
establish a throne against which wealth and force would be weak and
contemptible. No human device has ever prevailed against it, no array
of majorities or respectabilities; but neither Cæsar nor Flamen ever
conceived a scheme so cunningly adapted to neutralize its power as that
graceful compromise which accepts it with the lip and denies it in the

life, which marries it at the altar and divorces it at the church-door.

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER
1860
While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy
which never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the
new Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure
which more than anything else mark the essential difference between
our own form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis
in our domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since
we became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for
good or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November,
we might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has
thus far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference
to the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid
unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in
this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the
general persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a
foregone conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and
therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For though during
its term of office the government be practically as independent of the
popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are
called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men
composing it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to

turn a radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility; then for the first time he becomes capable of
that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the
narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each other
and to political consequences. The theory of democracy presupposes
something of these results of official position in the individual voter,
since in exercising his right he becomes for the moment an integral part
of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory, a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government