THE MACHINERY OF ELECTIVE GOVERNMENT. 631 



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 opin- 

 ions 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 at- 

 tached 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 emol- 

 ument. The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from 

 those numberless impostors who have deluded the ignorant with professions in- 

 compatible 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 dis- 

 guise his secession by an appeal from the living Whigs to the Whigs 

 who were in their graves. It cleai'ly 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 funda- 

 mental 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 astrono- 

 mers 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- 



