Page:The knickerbocker (IA knickerbocker00agne).pdf/14
Democratic party can be wheedled into submission to power, by such manifestations of subserviency, and of determination to hold the reins of government at all hazards, or be so blinded by sophistical reasoning as to go quietly hood-winked into nonentity. It is asking a great deal of that great party to ask it to regard itself as naught, to surrender its prestige and its moral power, to confess that its silence is essential to the welfare of the Union, its triumph equivalent to its knell.
But, says the wizard author, to 'replace the Democratic party in power would be a restoration, of all things the worst in times of civil commotion.' One might suppose that the Democratic party was an essential tyrant, notwithstanding the mild, genial success with which it has so long administered the government of this country. We are led to think of a Charles, or of a Robespierre or worse, when it is intimated that the replacement of the Democratic party in power would be of all things the worst; worse even than slavery, which Mr. Lincoln has lately pronounced the sum of all villainies; for, 'if slavery is not a sin, then nothing is a sin,' a monstrous, untheological, anti-Biblical dogma.
No other restoration surely can here be meant than that of the assumption of the reins of Government by the Democratic party. This arguing is really like attempting to frighten children with a bugbear, and not reasoning with men of intelligence. To show some semblance of reason at least, it is however contend-ed that no reliance is to be placed on the Democratic party, because it would necessarily 'be governed by its most violent members.' It is by no means unnatural that such a presumption should lie as a fact in the mind of such writers as the author, since it is very evident that Mr. Lincoln, by his own recent confession, and the Republican party, have been brow-beaten and controlled by the extremist wing of that party, by its 'most violent members.' That wing, with them, has the vigor, the boldness, the persistence, the sagacity, which secure predominance; but there is no parallelism here with the Democratic party, because the intelligence, courage, and sagacity hero belong to the abettors of gentle manners, mild treatment, and, above all, constitutional rights and duties. A restoration in this case would simply be taking the reins out of the hands of drivers like Jehu, and putting them into the hands of those used to both the horses and the roads; would be only replacing the inexperieneed with men of experience and of tried statesmanship. Such a restoration is a consummation most devoutly to be wished, and may God grant it to our almost ruined country!
This European idea of restoration is followed by a most dramatic and tragic representation of the horrors to settle on the land, in consequence of this awful restoration! Why, there would be a 'proscription quite as bad as any thing known to the Romans!' 'deeds that would make our country a by-word, a hissing!' 'an end of all our fine hopes!' 'prosperity would never return!' 'our constitutional (?) polity would give way to a cannonarchy!' 'the Confederacy would become the greatest power in North-America!' and so many other tearfully tragic issues are to come out of this restoration, that they defy quotation, and even startle us in the very reading. If some Republican manager will only take the material and work it up into form and figure, bring it out on the stage with sympathizing actors, we promise a full house, and should the spectators also be sympathetic, a tearful, dolorous, tragic house.
For our part, we had thought that this very restoration is to be the only averter of all these ills, most of them already upon us; the only restorer of health and life and vigor to the bleeding, mangled body of the State.
The only remaining argument consists in replying to the oft-repeated saying, that the rebels would lay down their arms and return into the Union on the restoration to power of the Democratic