The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 8

the accession
of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that history is not
without examples of kings who have lost their crowns through the folly
and false security of their ministers. It is quite true that there is a large
class of reasoners who would weigh all questions of right and wrong in
the balance of trade; but we cannot bring ourselves to believe that it is a
wise political economy which makes cotton by unmaking men, or a
far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an immediate money-profit as
a safe equivalent for a beggared public sentiment. We think Mr.
Hammond even a little premature in proclaiming the new Pretender.
The election of November may prove a Culloden. Whatever its result, it
is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether the American
idea is to govern this continent, whether the Occidental or the Oriental
theory of society is to mould our future, whether we are to recede from
principles which eighteen Christian centuries have been slowly
establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the stake and so
many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in favor of some
fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of Abraham, of
which all that can be said with certainty is that they did not add to his
domestic happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody knows,
but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The supporters
of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform the
Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may be
very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal question
on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a question, too,

which this very election must decide in one way or the other--is the
interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution. All the
other parties equally assert their loyalty to that instrument. Indeed, it is
quite the fashion. The removers of all the ancient landmarks of our
policy, the violators of thrice-pledged faith, the planners of new
treachery to established compromise, all take refuge in the
Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie, Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any logical
sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the Constitution,
Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our statesmen could be
"happy with either, were t' other dear charmer away." Mr. Douglas
confides the secret of his passion to the unloquacious clams of Rhode
Island, and the chief complaint made against Mr. Lincoln by his
opponents is that he is too Constitutional.
Meanwhile, the only point in which voters are interested is, What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others; nay, over
man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it,
means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has no
rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher law
than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not merely
the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more
selfish ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have convenient
phrases to be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing
or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency
may seem to require; but since both claim the regular Democratic
nomination, we have little difficulty in divining what their course
would be after the fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected.
We know too well what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two
faces which each shows by turns under the same hood. Everybody
remembers Baron Grimm's story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789

exhibited the royal Bengal tiger under the new character of national, as
more in harmony with the changed order of things. Could the animal
have lived till 1848, he would probably have found himself offered to
the discriminating public as the democratic and social ornament of the
jungle. The Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor
under even more frequent and incongruous aliases: it is now national,
now conservative, now constitutional; here it represents
Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the
Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged,
and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive.
Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth