< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu
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THE MACHINERY OF ELECTIVE GOVERNMENT.

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them with effect. Therefore every honorable connection will avow it is their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution with all the power and authority of the state. As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty to contend for those situations. Without a proscription of others, they are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things; and by no means for private considerations to accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included; nor to suffer themselves to be led or to be controlled, or to be overbalanced in office or in council by those who contradict the very fundamental principles on which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must stand. Such a generous contention for power on such manly and honorable maxims will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless impostors who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and have afterward incensed them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude.

Such is the vindication of party by a public man who himself broke away from party, outraged connection, and vainly attempted to disguise his secession by an appeal from the living Whigs to the Whigs who were in their graves. It clearly implies that the community is divided by a difference of opinion, not only on ordinary matters and points of current administration, but on some question of fundamental character and of paramount importance. Nothing less can make the submission of the individual intellect and conscience to party discipline rational or moral. In the absence of such a question, party is faction, the ruin of all commonwealths. Is the stock of such questions inexhaustible? In Canada it is already exhausted, and the two parties there are simply two factions, fighting for place with the usual weapons, and poisoning the political character of the people in the process; no man of sense cares a farthing which of the two, as a party, is for the time being in the ascendant; but every man of sense perceives that if the faction fight continues to rage much longer it will bring disaster on the country. As the earth—according to astronomers—sees in her satellite, of which the atmosphere is exhausted, what her own eventual condition will be, so England may see in her colony what her party government will be when the list of organic questions comes to an end. In the United States, party had its origin in the conflict between Federal unity and State right; then slavery sheltered itself behind State right as a rampart against legislative abolition, and the party conflict raged on the double issue with increasing heat, till it burst into the flame of civil war. Now, though the memory of the war lingers, though there is still a feeling that its issues may possibly be revived, though the negro's liberty of suffrage remains a subject of contention, though a solid South is the core of the Democracy, the parties are evidently breaking up. In each of them, particularly in the Republican party, there is a split wider than the interval of opin-

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