perquisites, fame, tangling alliances, priest-craft, and spiritual wickedness in high places, struck hands and revelled in midnight splendor.—Trouble, vexation, perplexity, and contention, mingled with hope, fear, and murmuring, rumbled through the Union and agitated the whole nation as would an earthquake at the centre of the earth, the world, heaving the sea beyond its bounds, and shaking the everlasting hills; so, in hopes of better times, while jealousy, hypocritical pretensions, and pompous ambition were luxuriating on the ill-gotten spoils of the people, they rose in their majesty like a tornado, and swept through the land, till Gen. Harrison appeared, as a star among the storm-clouds, for better weather.
The calm came; and the language of that venerable patriot, in his inaugural address, while descanting upon the merits of the Constitution and its framers, thus expressed himself: "There were in it, features which appeared not to be in harmony with their ideas of a simple representative Democracy or Republic. And knowing the tendency of power to increase itself, particularly when executed by a single individual, predictions were made that, at no very remote period, the Government would terminate in virtual monarchy. "It would not become me to say that the fears of these patriots have been already realized.—But as I sincerely believe that the tendency of measures and of men’s opinions, for some years past, has been in that direction, it is, I conceive, strictly proper that I should take this occasion to repeat the assurances I have heretofore given of my determination to arrest the progress of that tendency, if it really exists, and restore the Government to its pristine health and vigor." This good man died before he had the opportunity of applying one balm to ease the pain of our groaning country, and I am willing the nation should be the judge, whether General Harrison, in his exalted station, upon the eve of his entrance into the world of spirits, told the truth or not: with acting President Tyler’s three years of perplexity, and pseudo-Whig democratic reign, to heal the breaches or show the wounds, secundum artum, (according to art.—) Subsequent events, all things considered, Van Buren’s downfall, Harrison’s exit, and Tyler’s self-sufficient turn to the whole, go to show, as a Chaldean might exclaim: Beràm etài elàuh beshmayàuh gauhàh rauzèen: (Certainly there is a God in heaven to reveal secrets.)
No honest man can doubt for a moment but the glory of American liberty is on the wane, and that calamity and confusion will sooner or later destroy the peace of the people. Speculators will urge a national bank as a savior of credit and comfort. A hireling pseudo priesthood
