train of followers: now, they rely for respect and support upon the
judgment of the honest and enlightened. Then, the rank and file of party
were mere political hirelings, who sold their manhood for place, who
reviled and glorified, and shouted huzzas and whispered calumnies, just
as they were bidden; they could fawn upon those who dispensed political
patronage with a cringing servility that would shame the courtiers of
Louis XIV., or the parasites and hirelings of Walpole: now, all
political partisans, deriving their moral tone from the piping times of
peace, are pure, disinterested patriots, who, like the Roman farmer,
take office with great reluctance, and resign it again as soon as the
state can spare their services. Then, prize-fighters, and blacklegs, and
gamblers, having formed themselves into political clubs, were courted by
men high in authority, and rewarded for their dirty and corrupting
partisan services by offices of trust and responsibility: now, no man
clothed with authority would dare to insult the moral sense of community
by receiving such characters in the national councils, or by bestowing
public offices upon these corrupt and loathsome dregs of society.

Such, the advocates of non resistance would persuade us, are the
legitimate results in this country of war on the one hand and of a
long-protracted peace on the other. But there are men of less vivid
imaginations, and, perhaps, of visions less distorted by fanatical zeal,
who fail to perceive these results, and who even think they see the
reverse of all this. These men cannot perceive any thing in the lives of
Washington, Hamilton, and Knox, to show that they were the less virtuous
because they had borne arms in their country's service: they even fail
to perceive the injurious effects of the cultivation of a military
spirit on the military students of West Point, whose graduates, they
think, will compare favorably in moral character with the graduates of
Yale and Cambridge. Nay, more, some even go so far as to say that our