The subordination of the Free States in the administration of the government is traced to the moral disintegration which has set in, and after a recital in incisive terms of the act in subversion of true democracy which they have been compelled to witness, he closes with this appeal: “It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them.... Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,--that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,--that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,--that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.”
The merits and the defects of Lowell’s political writings appear in this article. There is the divination of the real question, the reference to moral principles, and the witty phrase; but also there is that sort of coruscation of language which tends to conceal point and application. The writing is that of a good talker rather than of a good pleader. The very breadth of the play of mind in Lowell militated against directness of attack. He finds the seat of the difficulty not in this or that political blunder, but in a disintegration of the public conscience which had long been going on, and he sees no remedy for this but in the arousing of the individual responsibility. It is the voice of the preacher, and even so not of the crusading preacher.