Politics

THE chief political event of the month of June was not the Philadelphia Convention, where General Grant was renominated with such suspicious unanimity ; nor any of the other conventions that filled the newspapers with their transient rumors and their perishable eloquence. These mark but tides and currents with their floating drift-wood ; while the speech of Mr. Sumner against the President is a heavy anchor thrown to the bottom to keep the ship from drifting. If it finds “holding ground ” in the mood of the people, it will offer the greatest resistance yet made to the re-election of Grant; if the people give little heed, Mr. Sumner himself is to suffer by it. How then has the country received it ? Evidently not as Mr. Sumner hoped, for he permitted himself to imagine it might defeat the renomination at Philadelphia; but quite as evidently not as the President’s partisans expected cither. It was widely

published, though few of the administration journals gave it in full ; and it has been generally read, as all Mr. Sumner’s great speeches are, — read with a shock and thrill of pain too, for men said, “ Can it be that we obey such a blockhead Cæsar as these words describe ? ” And the first answer was commonly, “No, General Grant has some traits of the picture, but it is not a portrait.” Even if it were true, said some, why paint it ? “Why insist upon the deformities of the woman whom your friend is about to marry ? If he has made up his mind to take her for better or worse, he will think as well of her as possible, and as ill of you for decrying her. This was the obvious mistake of Mr. Sumner in waiting till the minister and the wedding guests had arrived before he forbade the banns. Had he made the same speech the week before the Cincinnati Convention, Mr. Greeley would not have been nominated there, and perhaps not General Grant at Philadelphia. But when he did make it, the Republicans had agreed to take Grant for better or worse, and the sharp criticism only enraged them, or grieved them ; it has not yet convinced them, and there is no immediate prospect that it will.

This does not hinder it from being a great speech, nor from having ultimately a great effect on the Presidential canvass. It may not be unanswerable, but it certainly has not been answered. It is no answer to say, as the newspapers do, that Mr. Stanton did mention General Grant’s name in his campaign addresses of 1868 ; the fact remains that in 1869 Mr. Stanton did not think him fit to be President. Indeed, some of the administration journals admit that lie “cannot govern this country,” and say that he never should try ; that he lets the people govern it, as they ought. But if this were so, and the President only a figurehead to our ship, we should have a right, surely, to demand a more ornamental one. Nor is it any answer to praise General Grant’s military success, as Mr. Logan does, for that Mr. Sumner admits; nor to tell the Massachusetts Senator, as Mr. Carpenter did, that he is as bad as Burke, or is guilty of blasphemy for inventing an addition to the decalogue, or to say that gift-taking and nepotism are right. Quite as effective would it be to reply to Mr. Sumner, quoting from Scripture, that “ a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise,” “General Grant is not wise, and therefore the text has no application to him.” Nor is it any answer, hardly even a fair comment on the speech, to charge that angry personal feeling inspired it. For anger could not invent the facts narrated, and it is these, rather than the inferences from them, that condemn the President. He has taken gifts, he has appointed his relatives to office, he has quarrelled with many persons, he has neglected and violated laws, he has shown an ignorance of the first principles of statesmanship, and surrounded himself with unworthy persons. Whatever Mr. Sumner’s private griefs may be, these things are publicly true and have lost none of their truth by Mr. Sumner’s manner of statement. This also, it must be said, is singularly compact and simple for the Senator. He is always ornate and clumsy in quotation, always embroiders his matter too much with certain stiff rhetorical patterns, always says grotesque things. But the effect of none of his speeches is grotesque, least of all this one. The peculiar rhetoric is there, but also a nervous strength, a paring away of his periods, which few of his speeches can equally show. Whatever its faults of rhetoric, it has been read and will be read and pondered more than any speech yet made in this political campaign.

THE late Republican Convention at Philadelphia was in some respects the most remarkable of all the national conventions ; no less so in its way, perhaps, than the Charleston and Baltimore Conventions of the Democratic party in 1860, through the action of which tire Republican party was introduced to power in the national government. Then, as now, the dominant party in the country was seriously divided, and had for its opponents the rising hopes and liberal ideas of a new party, as well as the traditions and prejudices of air old and dying organization. But no contrast could be sharper than that afforded by the Democratic Convention of 1860 and the Republican Convention of 1872 ; the one full of faction and contest from the first, and foreordained to be broken in two as it finally was at Baltimore ; the other manifesting a strict unanimity too complete to be real, and therefore, as was remarked above, open to suspicion. Again, at Charleston the negro was trampled under foot and spurned equally by both factions of the Democracy, while at Philadelphia he was held in exceptional honor, took a leading part in the speech-making, and wielded the balance of power in the only disputed nomination. Yet several of the delegates at Charleston and at Philadelphia were the same men, — Orr of South Carolina, Butler and Loring of Massachusetts, for example ; and Dr. Loring, who was prominent in the most ultra proslavery faction of the Democracy in 1860, was one of the architects of the Philadelphia platform and the leading member of the Massachusetts delegation ; while the honors of the New York delegation, and indeed of the whole convention, fell upon Mr. Gerrit Smith, the old friend and coadjutor of John Brown. The nomination of General Grant by this convention, was expected by everybody, but it was believed there would be a show of opposition, as in the French plébiscites ; yet there was none at all, while his picture, as the “ man on horseback” seen by Caleb Cushing in apocalyptic vision, was unveiled by a true Parisian coup de théâtre, amid the plaudits of seven hundred and sixty-two unanimous delegates. To join with his name that of Henry Wilson for the second place on the ticket was also natural in such a convention, though few except Mr. Wilson himself expected it beforehand ; and this name, on the whole, has strengthened the ticket where it most needed strength, — at the South and in doubtful States like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. The platform is an ingenious composition, best described perhaps in the apologetic speech of Mr. Scofield, who submitted it, wherein he expressed the hope that “ if gentlemen did not find in the platform everything they desired, they would rest assured that nothing was excluded from any indisposition to take up and act upon everything.” Indeed, its comprehensiveness is only equalled by its vagueness. If it were as pronounced as it is long, it would be the most aggressive political platform ever offered to an indifferent people; but its native hue of resolution nowhere departs from the paleness and sympathetic invisibility for which platforms are noted. Hold the tariff resolution to the fire of the Pennsylvania smelting-furnace, and it reads “ Protection ” ; warm it in the blaze of a prairie-fire, and it can be translated “ Revenue Reform.” The resolution about women is equally equivocal ; it satisfies the ardent Dr. Blackwell, and is supposed not to offend the conservative Dr. Todd. Some of the other resolutions are open to another sort of comment ; they are not so vague as they are canting. We are told in the first one that the Republican party has held “ supremacy ” for eleven years, has suppressed rebellion, emancipated four million slaves, created and reduced the debt, etc., etc., and then we are solemnly assured in the fifth, sixth, and tenth resolutions that this same party believes that the civil service ought to be reformed, land grants to corporations no longer made, and the franking privilege abolished. Is it possible, the credulous reader may ask, that this great party, that could confer suffrage upon the blacks, has not yet been able to abolish the franking privilege ? Arc the Republicans that claim the credit of measures for which we are paying by taxation at the rate of $ 150,000,000 a year, still giving away millions of acres to railroad stock-jobbers ? Have they exterminated slavery, and yet not stopped the political assessments in the custom-houses and post-offices ? Where there ’s a will there’s a way ; and this platform shows exactly how much sincerity there is in the party professions on these matters of present importance. The sixteenth resolution will be hailed at the South either as a bitter joke or as the harbinger of a change of policy. If honest, it is both a confession and a promise of amendment; for it pledges the party to “ respect the powers reserved by the people to themselves as carefully as the powers delegated by them to the States and to the Federal government ” ; and it disapproves of “ an interference with rights not surrendered by the people.” But the cynical Southern men will say that the party has respected these powers equally by treating all with like disrespect, and that its whole course since 1868 has been an interference with rights that were either not surrendered or were given back after the Rebellion. The candidates presented are more important than the platform, however, and of these we must speak in another connection. They represent the party in its present attitude as well as any two men could ; while the only candidates yet offered on the other side ludicrously fail to represent the principles for which they are supposed to stand. In this respect Philadelphia was far more logical than Cincinnati; yet Cincinnati had the more honest platform and represented a spontaneous utterance of popular sentiment much better than Philadelphia.

BEFORE this page comes to our readers, the Baltimore Convention will have come and gone. Though it is still a future event as we write, there is now as little doubt that it will ratify the Cincinnati ticket, as there was beforehand that General Grant would be nominated at Philadelphia. State convention after convention has yielded to Mr. Greeley, until the continuance or repeal of that ancient Democratic device, the “ twothirds rule,” is no longer of any importance, for it is plain that more than two thirds of the convention will favor him. Meantime, the New York conference, at which it was hoped to set aside Greeley and present a new name for the opponents of Grant to unite upon, has only strengthened the Greeley movement, giving to it the now undoubted support of Senators Schurz and Trumbull, of Messrs. Cox and Brinckerhoff of Ohio, Mr. David A. Wells, Colonel Grosvenor, and other hesitating leaders of the Liberal Republicans. The nomination of Mr. William Groesbeck and Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted for President and VicePresident, by a small segment of the FreeTrade party, respectable as the ticket and its supporters are, hardly offers the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans an alternative, from the choice they are now required to make between Grant and Wilson on one side, and Greeley and Brown on the other. Either the Philadelphia or the Cincinnati ticket now seems certain to be elected ; let us see what are the attractions and the probable destinies of each. Between the two Presidential candidates, pitiful as it is to be compelled to choose one of two evidently unfit persons for the highest office in the nation, our preference and that of the American people, we trust, would be for General Grant. He represents a great success, partly military and partly political, in conquering the Rebellion and closing the era of civil war; though of proved incapacity in civil government, he is still believed to be honest, cautious, and steady, with a reserve of intellectual power and moral purpose which, in any coming crisis of our affairs, might be an invaluable aid to the country. Mr. Greeley, on the other hand, though gifted with more political wisdom, a warmer heart, and a clearer perception of ideas and principles, is believed to be capricious, conceited, peculiarly open to flattery and prejudice, bold in opinion, but timid in action, and with that indefinable something in his character which makes it impossible not to laugh at him, however much we may esteem him. If Grant is stolid, barren of ideas, and below the intellectual level of Jackson, Taylor, and Harrison, as we doubt not he is, Greeley, with his immense experience and acuteness and philanthropic philosophy of life, is still un-

steady, grotesque, obstinate, and ridiculous, —epithets never yet justly applicable, all at once, to a President of the United States. Strange crisis in our politics that makes a choice imperative between these two men, neither of whom can be called a statesman, or even be said to embody the popular conception of Presidential qualities ! An American President, to be widely popular, must have real greatness like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, or certain martial qualities like Jackson ; he may have plain manners like Jefferson, or distant manners like Washington, or a native blending of coarseness and dignity like Jackson and Lincoln, but he must have at heart a sincere desire for his people’s good, obvious to them as they meet him. In this General Grant conspicuously fails ; his presence inspires no enthusiasm, his pulse does not beat with the popular heart; he has the coldness of Washington without his lofty self-devotion, Mr. Greeley goes to the other extreme ; he is of the people too much to hold their respect, even when he arouses their enthusiasm ; there is nothing august about him, he does not rise with the occasion as Lincoln did, and the moods of his mind, like the tones of his voice, are more apt to provoke a smile than to compel attention and deference. In these regards he is not the equal of Senator Wilson, whom in many points he closely resembles, though a man of far wider reach and power of mind. Again, there are points of resemblance between General Grant and the second candidate on the opposing ticket; although Mr. Brown is a man fertile in ideas and with no lack of political experience.