Is not this exactly Mr. Buller's proposition? "Let us have the Whigs back for a few years longer; let us return to our admirable foreign policy; and when we have successfully embroiled ourselves with America, lost Canada, been beaten in China, driven out of our Eastern possessions, and provoked a war with France, then I 'm your man for an Income Tax; lay it on only heavily; let the nation, already bowed down under the heavy burden of its calamities, receive in addition the gracious boon of enormous taxation." Homoeopathy teaches us that nothing is so curative in its agency, as the very cause of our present suffering, or something as analogous to it as possible; and, like Hahnemann, Mr. Buller administers what the vulgar call "a hair of the dog that bit us," as the most sovereign remedy for all our evils.
The country is like a sick man with a whitlow, for the cure of which his physician prescribes a slight, but clearly necessary, operation. Another medical Dr. Buller is, however, standing by. He at once insinuates his veto; remarks upon the trivial nature of the disease--the un-painful character of the remedy; "but wait," adds he--"wait till the inflammation extends higher; have patience till the hand becomes swollen and the arm affected; and then, when your agony is beyond endurance, and your life endangered, then we 'll amputate the limb high up, and mayhap you may recover, after all."
As for me, it is the only occasion I 'm aware of, where a successful comparison can be instituted between honour and the Whigs; for assuredly neither have "any skill in surgery."
Every one knows that men in masses, whether the same be called boards, committees, aggregate, or repeal meetings, will be capable of atrocities and iniquities, to which, as individuals, their natures would be firmly repugnant. The irresponsibility of a number is felt by every member, and Curran was not far wrong when he said, a "corporation was a thing that had neither a body to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned."
It is, indeed, a melancholy fact, that nations partake much more frequently of the bad than the good features of the individuals composing them, and it requires no small amount of virtue to flavour the great caldron of a people, and make its incense rise gratefully to heaven. For this reason, we are ever ready to accept with enthusiasm anything like a national tribute to high principle and honour. Such glorious bursts are a source of pride to human nature itself, and we hail with acclamation these evidences of exalted feeling, which make men "come nearer to the gods." The greater the sacrifice to selfish interests and prejudices, the more do we prize the effort. Think for a moment what a sensation of surprise and admiration, wonderment, awe, and approbation it would excite throughout Europe, if, by the next arrival from Boston, came the news that "the Americans had determined to pay their debts!" That at some great congress of the States, resolutions were carried to the effect, "that roguery and cheating will occasionally lower a people in the estimation of others, and that the indulgences of such national practices may be, in the end, prejudicial to national honour;" "that honesty, if not the best, may be good policy, even in a go-a-head state of society;" "that smart men, however a source of well-founded pride to a people, are now and then inconvenient from the very excess of their smartness;" "that seeing these things, and feeling all the unhappy results which mistrust and suspicion by foreign countries must bring upon their com-merce, they have determined to pay something in the pound, and go a-head once more." I am sure that such an announcement would be hailed with illuminations from Hamburg to Leghorn. American citizens would be cheered wherever they were found; pumpkin pie would figure at royal tables, and twist and cocktail be handed round with the coffee; our exquisites would take to chewing and its consequences; and our belles, banishing Rossini and Donizetti, would make the air vocal with the sweet sounds of Yankee Doodle. One cannot at a moment contemplate what excesses our enthusiasm might not carry us to; and I should not wonder in the least if some great publisher of respectable standing might not start a pirated reprint of the _New York Herald_.