We must, in conclusion, once for all understand, that America has passed from the milder and more or less habitually restrained pursuit of riches of the previous centuries, in which the common effects of head and heart were at work, into the condition of highly stimulated desires and passions; and that it has passed from efforts, that sought their gratification by social ways and means, and by commercial and industrial strife, to the employment of partisan forces for these its purposes. All our public actions are therefore more demonstrative, more striking, and more colossal. Our private business relations have, on the other hand, become those things, in which most industry, most caution, most frugality, and most skill is necessary for success; while our public offices have become those places, in which the least knowledge, least economy, least faculty, and least genius is necessary to make a living. Hence all our cupidities have there their culmination, and there will of course be there also the final outcome of the whole procedure. It lies before us in all its grossness by a President put into the chief magistracy by fraud, and the fixed determination of both parties to carry their point next fallpeaceably, if they can; forcibly, if they must. We stand thus on the eve of great commotions, with a public mind filled with false ideas upon every subject, that concerns our public life. Our people would like to be rich and free, but, rather than not be rich, it will forge its own chains.

It has forged them already by intrusting the public administration of over one-fourth of all the wealth of the United States (8000 millions) to railroad, bank, insurance, and other corporations. Their offices are now the "bureaus," where American politics are, so far as one of the great parties are concerned, controlled. Every day this amount is increasing, and soon there will be, in these corporations, full half the wealth of the country, and be used for gaining advantage over the remainder.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

PERSONAL NOTICES.

Every great man means to work for eternity."-Schiller.

WHOEVER has observed the treatment, which prominent characters receive in America, must have noticed, that their good or bad reputations are more evanescent, than is the case amidst contemporary nations. The cause hereof must lie in a want of a full understanding of the sources of the good and evil that mars or beautifies our environments. We praise too readily and too highly, and again blame too much and too sharply. We mistake evidently the right of society to be the alpha and the omega of all public policies, for the right of the persons composing the respective society to form hasty judgments at pleasure, of the men acting on its behalf. A people's cause may be a supreme object, while those interested in it may not be fit to form a supreme opinion. Indeed, we may say, those causes are best served, of which there is least spoken and published while it is being carried on. It is, as Schiller well points out in the above quotation, the special attribute of great men to think much of the future, and to say but little; a remark never yet made of multitudes. They are necessarily bound up in thoughts of the present, and they are sure therefore to misunderstand a public man the more, the further he forecasts events, and the more he subjects existing means to the projects, which his mind has formed. To presume these to be always right, is as erroneous as to presume them always to be wrong. It is the intermixture of personal and private with public interests, that gives the false cast to the multitudinous as well as the individual mind. The question always is: Who has it the most? And if only both bear this in mind, they will find, that neither has the exclusive right to judge the other; and that it is far oftener of importance to a right understanding to inquire: what do the great men of the time think of the people? than it is to know, what the people of a period think of their great men. Who cares much to-day for the results of elections of Roman

consuls, as aids to a formation of correct opinions on men and things then in question? What still concerns us, however, are the preserved opinions of the men voted for or against, as furnished by true historians.

This chapter and its personal notices is written for the purpose of giving the impressions we derived of the persons named in pursuance of our investigations. We hope, that we have cleansed their fame of some of the grosser misjudgments, and that we have fallen into none ourselves. We give them under five heads (1) the revolutionary Fathers; (2) the equivocal period and its men; (3) the spoilers of American government; (4) the American fatalists, and (5) the traitors. The object of the division is to bring out their periodicities, as well as the range of thought, that imparted to them their special charac

teristics.

And we allow ourselves to premise them by a few farther brief general observations.

American great men owe their distinction entirely to themselves. They had neither hereditary privilege, nor royal favor to push them forward or to hold them back; but they had support as well as hindrances from popular admirations or dislikes, and also from the good or ill will of official persons, chiefly our Presidents. The public has not been steadfast to any of them, nor have they honorably assumed the responsibility for their choices or rejections. If things went right they allowed themselves to be flattered, and if things went wrong they shoved the blame on their own creatures. On the whole, then, public men in America have had and have a hard time of it. The "Sorrows of Werther" have had an author, but the sorrows of candidates for public favor, in this land of liberty, have never been written.

It was a double, fearful mistake to transfer the old English rule, that "the king can do no wrong," to the American people; because it brought popular self-delusion on the one hand, and injustice and neglect of the best men of the land on the other; for it made them the scapegoats of many evils not caused by them.

Clay's remark: "I would rather be right than President!" exhibits the poignancy of his feelings in the presence of a people whose votes were only to be got by accepting their fiat as right per se, while he could not help being conscious, that his single mind was more likely to seek and to find the truth, than a multitude caught in the mazes of its own will. He knew, indeed, that the other extreme, that of holding the people as always wrong per se, was also an error; but his desire to be

President, although subordinate to his own sense of right, was still strong enough to keep him from rising to the sublimity of telling American society the full truth. Had he been a laborious learner as well as an eloquent orator, and he would have known that society is never entirely wrong or right; but that a very close approximation to rightfulness may be attained by subjecting public opinion to the crucible of public discussion, legislative, executive and judicial deliberation, and thus forming it into a mature collective will.

Clay did not become President! He died, like his rival, Van Buren, a disappointed man, though the latter did become President. Both were the victims of the American politics of their time, that would sacrifice any public man that dared to think for himself. But it behoves us, that stand before their tombs, to realize Heine's words:

"Beneath every gravestone is a world-history."

With it before us, we can bring out, as to the American statesmen, who either partially or totally missed their career, that they did so, because they served a society, that was too selfsufficient to treat them right.

We could not help becoming aware, as we prepared ourselves for writing this book, by what the Germans call: "Quellen Studium," that American memories of their great men are but a charnel-house of either disfigured or falsely-remembered personages; and the thought arose that some time somebody should attempt to rescue them from the unrealities, with which either malevolence or adulation had bedaubed their fame. We concluded, perhaps too rashly, that we would attempt this for at least a portion of them. So we had to be, as the poet wrote: "A chiel's amang you takin' notes, . . . An', faith, he'll prent it."

And these notes assumed finally the shape of the "Personal Notices," which are before the reader. They are not biographies, not even in a supplemental sense; but brief sketches or, if you please, fragmentary delineations of what, we think, were the real characters of the men named.

And we hope it is proper to add: that this part of our work acted as a test of our previous labors, and that it was a great satisfaction to us to find, that the later narratives confirmed the preceding enunciations, and that we now had a portraiture of human lives that appeared to us to be a necessary complement of previous remarks. They test American politics by placing in juxtaposition actual men before actual things; a consummation

that seemed to us to be very necessary. The result, on our mind, has been a conviction, that men have, as a general fact, been truer to American society, than it was to them; and that it is high time, that this condition of things should receive its rectification.

THE REVOLUTIONARY FATHERS.

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

“A good character shines by its own light.”—Publius Syrus.

WASHINGTON Was much esteemed by his countrymen, and also by the British high officials that were sent here, before the revolution. But by neither as fully as he deserved. Nor was he by either as much employed, as would have brought out his full capacities for the Colonies or the States respectively. Great Britain's colonial policy rested on the assumption that the glory and profit of the mother-country was the criterion of all public steps; and they could not employ Americans unreservedly, up to their merits, for they did not want them to be great. The American people labored, however, under a similar misconception; they admired themselves so much, and believed their grandeur and opulence of such transcendent importance, as compared to the careers of individuals, as to make them ever stingy in the conferment of powers. Washington never received the authority, nor the army, nor the money that "would," to use his own words from his Circular Letter, dated Newburg, June 8, 1783, "have brought the war to a happy issue in a shorter time and with less cost." He was unjustly blamed for miscarriages, "which" (again using his own words) "were due to the feebleness of the respective governments and the inadequate use of the public resources.' And he added: “Inefficiences were caused by undue restrictions placed on the powers proper to be exercised by the highest authorities." He speaks in the same letter of the "confusion that discouraged the army," and he charges it on "the notorious defects of the then federal Constitution."

The intrigues of Conway, secretly seconded by Mifflin, look incredible to us; they were but too true of the period-1775. They were backed by a strong popular feeling, that believed that