Politics

THE humorous nomination of the ironical convention which met at Cincinnati in May has been received by the nation with the contrasted feelings usually awakened in mixed audiences by a joke ; the great mass have no real pleasure in it ; many whose opinions or prejudices have been trifled with resent it ; a few like it ; but at first everybody laughs. To be sure Mr. Greeley was in some respects a pretty old joke, and most of us had had our gibe at his knowledge of farming, his white hat, and his handwriting ; but the public is something of a great child in these matters, and likes the same thing over and over again. Besides there was actually a shock of novelty in the choice of a lifelong protectionist by a convention resulting from a movement of free-trade reformers, and electrical laughter naturally ran along all the telegraph wires in the country, and set the whole Union on the broad grin.

It was so altogether preposterous, under the circumstances, and his election would be so much less surprising, that people began to say that very probably he would be elected. We suppose there never was any very good ground for this belief, and its fallacy soon appeared, and has constantly grown more evident. The Democrats, whom the gods have made definitively mad, seem resolved by a large majority to refuse their opportunity ; the sincere freetraders who, in a convention that united the wisdom of the dove to the harmlessness of the serpent, were certainly not answerable for the result, have generally rejected it ; the wavering Republicans, who were halting between their allegiance to General Grant and their hopes of a better man, have almost universally determined to bear the ills they have ; the white Southern vote may be won for Mr. Greeley, but the black Southern vote cannot be counted upon for any one who wants the white vote ; the Irish vote — the intelligent, the logical, the delightful Irish vote — will be cast, as it has always been, for the choice of the Democratic Convention, whoever or whatever that may be. These things are plain enough to any reader of the newspapers ; not merely the city journals, which attempt to lead popular opinion, but also the country papers, which are simply content to express it ; and in the mean time the charges brought against Mr. Greeley, and the reasons given why he should not be elected, present a diversified and instructive prospect to the philosophical observer. On one hand he is held to be unsafe for the station he seeks, because, though a man of good intentions and excellent heart, he is of so guileless and single a mind, that he will become the mere tool of the wicked, and will lead us to ruin by paths that he blindly takes to be the flowery ways of reform ; on the other hand it is declared that his seeming simplicity and virtue do but cover a wily and treacherous nature, an unscrupulous ambition, an utter lack of principle. By some he is pronounced unfit to preside in the White House because his manners are not agreeable, and he does not dress stylishly ; Mr. Wendell Phillips believes that he has a “ secret understanding if not a positive contract ” with the Rebel voters at the South to place Jeff. Davis in his Cabinet; others insinuate that he is in league with Tammany ; others yet doubtless have their little fears of Fourierism, of free-love, of miscegenation, of woman’s rights, of premature peace with the belligerent South, or a precipitate attack on Richmond, — of that whole order of sidelong, eccentric, suddenly repentant, violently persistent progress which is more vividly embodied to the popular fancy by the name of Greeley than lay any other word. We have still to wait for the stock accusations of drunkenness, ancestral piracy, Catholicism, and the habitual violation of all the commandments ; but it is yet early in the canvass, and they will doubtless appear in good time.

For our part, at a moment which seems favorable for all desiring to set up a private conscience, we confess that we should be very little troubled if we were an original Greeley man by any of the facts of the present situation, save the fact that Mr. Greeley has consented to forego all his high protection principles and, if elected, not to use his power against the free-trade which he has always professed to believe unspeakably disastrous. On this point we should waive discussion ; as for the rest, we should answer that no friend of Mr. Greeley ever pretended that he was a glass of fashion or a mould of form, and that he might do uncouth things in the White House, but more probably would not; that the bargain with Jeff. Davis and the league with Tammany had not the shadow of proof ; that the evidence of Mr. Greeley’s political wickedness was rather to be found in the rancor of his enemies than the depravity of the Causes he had espoused ; that he was fickle, and eccentric, yes, but his sudden changes were from conviction, and that obstinacy was quite as bad in a President as honest inconsistency ; that the possession of office is itself often ballast enough to steady the most erratic craft ; and that finally the reasons against Mr. Greeley are so contradictory that they cannot all be good. They leave in fact a great deal to be said in his favor, — as, that he is a man of unimpeachable private life, just, charitable, generous ; that like many of our greatest statesmen he has raised himself from an obscure station, by his own unaided exertions, to a place of great power and distinction ; that though he has been all his life a politician, he has never basely sought office, and never held office save once, and then very briefly ; that with all his errors, his influence has always been used in favor of every true reform, as well as many that merely promised well ; that he is a thorough believer in American ideas and things.

We say, a very pretty case could be made out for Mr. Greeley by the original Greeley man, and yet we should not be wholly persuaded by him. We should fear that trait of inconstancy and that tendency to panic and compromise which have appeared in Mr. Greeley at most great crises ; and we should distrust his knowledge of men. We should totally object to his protectionist ideas, and we should not think it augured well for the future that he had been willing to hold them in abeyance as the price of his nomination. In short, between Mr. Greeley and General Grant, we should prefer General Grant, of whom we have some reason to think that we know the worst. Under him during the next four years it is not probable that the nation would be debauched by an entire change of office-holders ; and it appears that he favors civil-service reform at least as much as Mr. Greeley does. His relations are now, we believe, all comfortably provided for ; grateful citizens have showered upon him as many gifts as he will probably care to receive ; the Mormon persecutions will hardly be resumed ; the Alabama question is in the way to be settled, however ingloriously ; and there are no very menacing difficulties before us. His re-election in view of the fact that vast numbers of Republicans would vote for him as a choice of evils, could not he taken for unqualified approval of his administration ; and throughout his second term of office his acts would be subject to the scrutiny and criticism of a minority within his own party more numerous, active, and determined than that which has already existed.

We are not, it may have been surmised, very ardent for Grant ; but it is scarcely possible that the Philadelphia Convention, by the time this reaches the reader, will have nominated any other, and it is not probable that any better candidate will be presented to the people during this canvass.

The original Grant men can doubtless make a more flattering statement for him than we have done; the original Greeley men are, as we have shown, not without defence ; the only men who have nothing at all to say for themselves are the original Cincinnati Convention men, who expected something more than a division of the party from that body. As one of these, we hereupon hold our peace.