TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POLITICIANS OF CHICAGO.
THE nomination of General M'Clellan by the Democratic Convention at Chicago as its candidate for the next Presi- dency has been received in this country by the self-styled friends of peace with a vacant and irrational joy. The Con- federate organ the Index, even before the news of the fall of Atlanta and the defeat of the Confederate General Hood, had candidly admitted that 31' Clellan's election as President could not well hasten peace. But the recent great successes of Mr. Lin- coln's generals will probably nip in the bud even such chances of election as General M'Clellan once had. But suppose it other- wise, what could General M'Clellan's election mean except a return to the faded craft of that vaunted compromise policy which yields principles to gain time,—first, a disgraceful and useless fawning onthe pro-Slaverypoliticians of the South in the cause of Union,—next, a dishonourable repulse,—and then at last an angry resumption of war after time had been given to the South to rally,—but of war undertaken to restore a Union with the living seeds of disunion as carefully preserved in it as ever, instead of such a war as the present, which is waged not only to put down rebellion but extinguish the causes of rebel- lion? That is what General M'Clellan's election would mean, and would only mean. The Democratic party dare not give up the magic formula of Union. The peace-at-any-price party had no supporters at Chicago. The platform adopted there and accepted by the unready soldier who having failed in arms has attempted to transfer to politics the same lukewarm and half-and-half policy which caused his ill-success as a general, is as much a Union platform as that of the supporters of General Fremont or Mr. Lincoln. The whole difference be- tween their and General M'Clellan's political principles is, that the latter pledges himself first to court and even compel a humiliating rebuff from the South, of which Mr. Jefferson Davis has not failed to give him ample and emphatic warning, and afterwards to protect with all his strength the seeds of fresh disunion wherever his arms may succeed in restoring nominal union. If it is a subject for intelligent and rational joy that this feeble representative of a flavourless policy may possibly be empowered by the ignorance and unscrupulousness of the Northern democracy, to plunge it into a larger, more wicked, and more hopeless contest for the mere cruel and greedy idol called Union, then only can we understand the sickly show of congratulation with which the friends of peace in England strive to utter the name of General M'Clellan. " The probability of the election of a man of the calibre of General M'Clellan," says the Times, " strikes us as being itself in the nature of a revolution. The notion that the American democracy should submit to place itself under a .ader, and that leader a man of character and ability unstain,, 'Y the arts of the demagogue, and trusted mainly for his pe , onal character, is so strange and startling that we really begin to hope the war has taught lessons never learnt in peace, and that in the hard school of adversity the evils engendered by a too luxuriant and exuberant prosperity may have found a remedy." We cannot think of a single fact justifying how- ever remotely such a judgment as this. Between the elec- tions of General Jackson in 1829 and Mr. Lincoln we do not re- member a single President who has not been of the calibre of General M'Clellan, —Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, they have one and all been more or less men of some culture and no principle, tools of the South, playing into the hands of the pro-Slavery party with polished treachery, and often with far more ability than General M'Clellan has shown any indication of possessing. Mr. Lincoln has been the first rude President, so to speak, since the days of the rough but able Jackson ; and he has been, as far as we can judge the history of the States, the first honest President since the time when the Democratic party first became the instruments in the hands of the malign Southern ambition. There is not a single intellectual quality in which the accomplished diplomatist ex-President Buchanan was not in all probability General M'Clellan's superior, nay, there is no moral quality belonging to a politician in which we have any evidence for thinking Mr. Buchanan inferior to the new Democratic favourite ; and yet of all the long file of bad rulers under which the earth has groaned we do not remember one who in a smooth and diplomatic way was worse, weaker, more mischievous and more contemptible, more shuffling in his treason to the Union and more vacillating in his assistance to the South, than President Buchanan. All we know of General M'Clellan is that he is following as far as he can at the present crisis in Mr. Buchanan's track, and why there- fore-his election, if it were to take place, should be " in the nature of a revolution " it would have been kind of our con- temporary to explain.
The truth is that the Chicago Democrats and their nomi- nee General M'Clellan represent but one deep-seated ten- dency in American politics,—the great political vice which the circumstances of their constitution have generated from the first, —an idolatry of Compromise. The Federation was itself a compromise, and a compromise not merely in practice, which is true of all political compacts, but in principle,— statesmen in all the States having agreed not only to tolerate for a time, but protect, guarantee, and help to perpetuate- what many of them, nay, most of them, both South and North, believed to be intrinsically poisonous to the life of the nation they were forming, and what they hoped with all their hearts might die out even while they solemnly pledged them- selves to foster and feed it. This origin of the American consti- tution has borne its natural fruit in moulding generation after generation of statesmen who have lived to devise, and died with the patriotic boast on their lips that they have devised, new artifices for procrastinating the crisis of an inevitable and desperate struggle. Run over the greater names of the Union statesmen of the half century previous to secession, take, for instance, Clay and Webster,—and we may truly say that each of these able and eminent men earned and re-earned his reputation wholly by mutilating his own most intimate convictions so as to make out of them and the convictions of his adversaries some platform on which, as he believed, the Union might be artificially propped up for a few years longer. Henry Clay of Kentucky, often called the "father of compro- mises," first distinguished himself by inventing and carrying, in conjunction with Calhoun, the Missouri Compromise as the condition of the admission of Missouri as a Slave State ; he next carried the compromise tariff, Calhoun reluctantly consenting, when South Carolina had threatened nullification ; he modified and then adopted Calhoun's memorable resolution, denying the right of Congress to legislate on slavery even for the district of Columbia, in which Washington is situated, in 1837-8, and so averted for a time the growing feud ; on the annexation of Texas he tried to avoid and did avoid declaring either for or against it; and he ended his life with his " Omnibus " Bill, a great effort to avoid deciding the question whether territorial legislatures should admit slavery or not. Mr. Clay of Kentucky has been the great model whom in his smaller way Mr. Crittenden has more recently striven to emulate. Clay, however, was a Border- State Unionist, and it is easy to see how Border-State states- men are born into the very spirit of compromise. Daniel Webster was a New Englander, and yet the same indelible character of the constitution fixed its mark upon him and made him a mere imitator of Clay. The whole spirit of his life was compromise for the sake of the Union,—one of his first steps being a compromise with Mr. Calhoun at the time South Carolina threatened nullification, and one of his last to sup- port the fugitive slave law of 1850. Even his foreign policy was often a mere manoeuvre to withdraw the attention of the States from internal differences, and no other consideration would probably have dragged so cautious and shrewd a states- man into the impertinent correspondence with Austria about Hungary in 1849. The truth simply is that statesmanship in the North has long meant nothing but vicious ingenuity in inventing compromises and staving off the evil hour, and hence the genuine Southern statesmen, like Calhoun in the later part of his career and Jefferson Davis throughout it, have had, and have still, all the advantage of a clear aim, homogeneous views, and a vice-like tenacity of purpose, over the hesitating and piteous bargainers of the Free States. Mr. Lincoln has been the first break in this long line of gentlemanly waverers, who have been always willing to pay, if so it must be, the full price asked by the Southern slave- owners for their adhesion and forbearance, yet the Times sees a wonderful revolution in the mere nomination of a man by the Democratic party who takes up all the old traditions, offers all the old bribes, will be guilty of any iniquity to save the Union, but dare not even whisper that he would sacri- fice it. Why instead of constituting a revolution, the choice of M'Clellan would be the return of the sow to her wallowing in the mire. It would be the re-entry of the evil spirit with seven other spirits worse than itself into the house that had been swept and garnished. We would not speak thus of any man who would venture to go openly for dis- union, and to encourage the North to develop the genius of her free institutions independently of the Slave States. That would be a clear and intelligible policy, likely to prove fruitful of good to one section of the country at least, if it held out also the terrible prospect of long life for a worse form of
slavery than the world has ever seen, in the other section of the States. But this is not the policy of Governor Seymour and M'Clellan. They take up again the old creed and reverently ap- propriate the worn-out mantle of Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan. They propose to wheedle the Slave States back into the Union at the cost of all faith and all freedom. They cry aloud to the South, "Make us your tools, your servile tools if you please, if you will only come back. Your fathers made our yoke heavy, but you shall add to our yoke. Your fathers chastised us with whips, but you shall chastise us with scorpions."
And oven that cry will not be beard. Mr. Davis has, we verily believe, too much of the statesman in him to rule again by pandering to the servility of the Northern democracy where he could not rule by the right of the stronger. He has found out how disgusting is the duty of governing, as Mr. Randolph of Virginia long ago said that the South governed the North, "not by our black slaves, but by your own white slaves," and he will not attempt it again. He will foil the Northern democracy by refusing all terms but independence, and then if General M'Clellan should after all be elected,—=which is, we think, improbable,—we should see the disgusting specta- cle of a bloody war renewed under a man who has vaunted his contempt for the only principle which can excuse it,— who has apologized for the rebellion and its principle when he hoped to bribe it into submission,—and will then be compelled by the utter break-down of his senseless manoeuvre to invade the rights he has justified and murder the men on whom he has fawned. In General M'Clellan the principle of compromise would thus indeed culminate. Many others of his predecessors have surrendered their principles cheerfully to purchase a peace,—but he would have done so only to exasperate a war,— to turn it from what has always a certain majesty—a con- flict of good and evil principles,—into the most miserable and evil of all human spectacles, a bloodthirsty strife in which nothing is at issue except the possession of the soil and the name of the victor.
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