ATTEMPT TO EXTEND THEIR POWER DIRECTLY OVER STATE AFFAIRS, THE LESS THEY, IN FACT, CONTROL THEM, AFTER HAVING ONCE PASSED THE POINT OF NAMING LAWGIVERS AS THEIR REPRESENTATIVES; MERELY BESTOWING ON A FEW ARTFUL MANAGERS THE INFLUENCE THEY VAINLY IMAGINE TO HAVE SECURED TO THEMSELVES.  This truth should be written in letters of gold, at every corner of the streets and highways in a republic; for truth it is, and truth, those who press the foremost on another path will the soonest discover it to be.  The mass may select their representatives, may know them, and may in a good measure so far sway them, as to keep them to their duties; but when a constituency assumes to enact the part of executive and judiciary, they not only get beyond their depth, but into the mire.  What can, what does the best-informed layman, for instance, know of the qualifications of this or that candidate to fill a seat on the bench!  He has to take another’s judgment for his guide; and a popular appointment of this nature, is merely transferring the nomination from an enlightened, and, what is everything, a RESPONSIBLE authority, to one that is unavoidably at the mercy of second persons for its means of judging, and is as IRRESPONSIBLE AS AIR.

At one time, Mark Woolston regretted that he had not established an opposition paper, in order to supply an antidote for the bane; but reflection satisfied him it would have been useless.  Everything human follows its law, until checked by abuses that create resistance.  This is true of the monarch, who misuses power until it becomes tyranny; of the nobles, who combine to restrain the monarch, until the throes of an aristocracy-ridden country proclaim that it has merely changed places with the prince; of the people, who wax fat and kick!  Everything human is abused; and it would seem that the only period of tolerable condition is the transition state, when the new force is gathering to a head, and before the storm has time to break.  In the mean time, the earth revolves, men are born, live their time, and die; communities are formed and are dissolved; dynasties appear and disappear; good contends with evil, and evil still has its day; the whole, however, advancing slowly but unerringly towards that great consummation, which was designed from the beginning, and which is as certain to arrive in the end, as that the sun sets at night and rises in the morning.  The supreme folly of the hour is to imagine that perfection will come before its stated time.

Chapter XXX.

    “This is thy lesson, mighty sea! 
      Man calls the dimpled earth his own,
    The flowery vale, the golden lea;
      And on the wild gray mountain-stone
    Claims nature’s temple for his throne! 
      But where thy many voices sing
    Their endless song, the deep, deep tone
      Calls back his spirit’s airy wing,
    He shrinks into himself, when God is king!”