The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 7

itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club,
with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are
commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed,
without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas) our
politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled,
unless in ancient Athens or mediæval Florence. Our Congress debates
and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions
of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable
Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him,
half a dozen years ago. If that personage, outraged in all the finer
sensibilities of our common nature, by failing to get the contract for
supplying the District Court-House at Skreemeropolisville City with
revolvers, was led to disparage the union of these States, it is seized on
as proof conclusive that the party to which he belongs are so many
Catalines,--for Congress is unanimous only in misspelling the name of
that oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms
always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief
Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection,
and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an
unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the
White House lures our public men away from present duties and
obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a
Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet,
whenever a President goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch
every member of the Committee. We are kept normally in that most

unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians
measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and
temporary expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation,
but which, if more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests
of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather of the
fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial, and that for
the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting adversely with
continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect of slavery upon
the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence
upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our
politicians into that first fatal compromise with their moral instincts and
hereditary principles which makes all consequent ones easy; it has
accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship, to subterfuge
instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and to a defiance of
the public sentiment of the civilized world for patriotism. We have
been asked to admit, first, that it was a necessary evil; then that it was a
good both to master and slave; then that it was the corner-stone of free
institutions; then that it was a system divinely instituted under the Old
Law and sanctioned under the New. With a representation, three fifths
of it based on the assumption that negroes are men, the South turns
upon us and insists on our acknowledging that they are things. After
compelling her Northern allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause
of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence (because it stood in
the way of enslaving men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared,
through the Supreme Court of the United States, that negroes are not
men in the ordinary meaning of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but
to find that we have eaten more than was necessary may chance to give
us an indigestion. The slaveholding interest has gone on step by step,
forcing concession after concession, till it needs but little to secure it
forever in the political supremacy of the country. Yield to its latest
demand,--let it mould the evil destiny of the Territories,--and the thing
is done past recall. The next Presidential Election is to say Yes or No.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing

moral degradation on the part of the Non-slaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry,--for
it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right; and
already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the capital
invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest achievement of
human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed