lous. Hardly a candidate for any office is put up, that he is not assailed by a dozen zealous party leaders, who urge him to pledge himself to something. Temperance men, tariff men, free-trade men, native Americans, free-soilers, abolitionists, all push forward their sine qua non, and say, "Agree to our terms first, or we will not vote for you, however otherwise qualified." It is in vain for the candidate to point to his past course and his general character, and beg to be allowed to go to his duties entirely free; to decide all practical questions upon their merits, when they shall arise. This satisfies no one; and, after being bandied about by his tormenters for a time, he makes a bargain, and agrees to be a sound politician, as party A understands it, if party A will support him, or as party B understands it, if party B will support him; or sometimes, when the claims are not absolutely contradictory, he buys the votes of several squads of voters with his ready-coined promises, and so makes up a bundle of political virtues, at what he perhaps considers a low price. But he is mistaken. The price he has paid is exorbitant beyond reckoning. He has exchanged all that is real in political virtue for a bundle of shams!
The history of our Congress, of late years, is the history of this school of politics. The scholars have made rapid progress, and in their annual exhibitions have given the world ample proof of it; so that the electors who have chosen them have often become ashamed of their choice, and have come to feel that their representatives, instead of being, as they should be, above the level of the nation, are actually below it; and yet they express astonishment that this should be so. Do they not remember that they chose these men to be their "servants," and that the master is greater than the man? Have they forgotten that they chose them without faith, depending not on their virtue and character, but on their promises and supposed interests; that they did not expect to bind these representatives to them by their independence and courage, but rather by their selfishness and their fears; and that there is nothing ennobling in this connection, but, on the contrary, every thing degrading? How can they expect, then, that men so chosen should be leaders of the
