The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 9

with sufficient precision in the
platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make
of Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct
parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them?
or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Père la Chaise, who,
with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's
gravestone to advertise that they still carry on business at the old stand?
Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us only a string
of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and Mr. Bell
preserves a silence singularly at variance with his patronymic. The only
public demonstration of principle that we have seen is an emblematic
bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man to lead him, and
a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as it moves along. Are
all the figures in this melancholy procession equally emblematic? If so,
which of the two candidates is typified in the unfortunate who leads the
horse?--for we believe the only hope of the party is to get one of them
elected by some hocus-pocus in the House of Representatives. The
little boy, we suppose, is intended to represent the party, which
promises to be so conveniently small that there will be an office for
every member of it, if its candidate should win. Did not the bell convey
a plain allusion to the leading name on the ticket, we should conceive it
an excellent type of the hollowness of those fears for the safety of the
Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's election, whose changes are so loudly
rung,--its noise having once or twice given rise to false alarms of fire,
till people found out what it really was. Whatever profound moral it be
intended to convey, we find in it a similitude that is not without

significance as regards the professed creed of the party. The industrious
youth who operates upon it has evidently some notion of the measured
and regular motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined and
conservative bells. He does his best to make theory and practice
coincide; but with every jolt on the road an involuntary variation is
produced, and the sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow
accordingly. We have observed that the Constitution was liable to
similar derangements, and we very much doubt whether Mr. Bell
himself (since, after all, the Constitution would practically be nothing
else than his interpretation of it) would keep the same measured tones
that are so easy on the smooth path of candidacy, when it came to
conducting the car of State over some of the rough places in the
highway of Manifest Destiny, and some of those passages in our
politics which, after the fashion of new countries, are rather corduroy in
character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of the
self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished members,
Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that its prime
object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican candidate. To
achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here with
the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very
Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption,
and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong
denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is perfectly plain that we have only
two parties in the field: those who favor the extension of slavery, and
those who oppose it,--in other words, a Destructive and a Conservative
party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact is a
very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign critics
who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to compel
larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are promoted,
not by any unthinking hostility to the rights of property, but by a

well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is Privilege, and not
Property, that is perplexed with fear of change. The conservative effect
of ownership operates with as much force on the man with a hundred
dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor with a million in the funds.
During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars who had funded their
gains were among the stanchest reactionaries, and left Rome with the
nobility. No question of the abstract right of property has ever entered
directly into our politics, or ever