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revealed by the state of our financial credit. This depends on a united and firm social estimate of its soundness, and this cannot be maintained by an ad ministration that so recklessly violates the Constitution, customs, and liberties of the country. How can there be any enduring confidence in the promises of a party which makes the obligation of its official oaths depend on circumstances; which authorizes the disregard of private contracts; and which, in the pursuit of fanatical theories, suffers its own credit to go down so low? Had it continued, as it set out, in the broad and beaten road of the Constitution, we might long since have had a suppression of the rebellion. It is at least fair to presume that we should have been exempt from serious division among ourselves.

We are willing to concede to President Lincoln as much honesty as belongs to human nature in general, as little ambition as usually torments men on the verge of power; and yet to believe him to be above the ordinary aspirations of man, stripped of the passions and propensities which characterize humanity, were, at once, to deify or angelify a fallen creature, or, at least, to bow down in a humiliating hero-worship.

There is something, indeed, which inspires a sort of worship of the person in power, who embodies our ideas and sentiments, and marches right on, in the realization of them. And if, in consummating his plans and aims, he surmount all obstacles, even at the expense of right, hosannas fill the air, and the loudest laudations reach his ear. The one idea overshadows all, and that realized and made potent, it matters little how the thing has been done, or what ill consequences may ultimately flow from it.

Certain very prominent notions in some men's minds, notions for the supremacy of which over all else they have long toiled and labored, have, under the present administration of our government, been partially realized, and others, it is hoped, will be. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that, from certain quarters and in certain magazines, the idea of the election to the Presidency, for the next term, of any other man than Mr. Lincoln should seem preposterous, and not to be thought of for a moment.

But the argument to this end, of the article on the 'Presidential Election,' in the 'Atlantic' for May, seems to us to rest on wrong principles, and to be carried out rather sophistically.

In the first place, in order to set off the present case as distinguished from every other, it is attempted to show that no election has, ever before, been held in the midst of war. It is contended that such was the case, in the war of 1812, with Great Britain, in the Texan and in the Mexican wars. Granting this to be literally true, set it is evident that in all these cases did the war question seriously affect and deeply enter into the elections of the day, just as the ruddy hues still illume the horizon, after the fiery sun has set. The speeches of Mr. Webster, in the latter cases, would prove very satisfactorily to all candid writers and readers that war was taken into the account in those elections, and was no obstacle to a free exercise of the elective franchise, and indeed never should be. If the passions of men are so uncontrollable, roused by stretches of power, on the one hand, and, on the other, by a strong sense of wrong which cuts into the very