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AMERICAN REVIEW.

Gontents for September.

THE WHIGS AND THEIR CANDIDATE. By Hon. D. D. Barnard,

AN EXCURSION TO DAMASCUS AND BA'ALBEK. By Professor Adolphus

L. Koeppen,

NE-SHE-KAY-BE-NAIS, OR THE "LONE BIRD." By E. G. Squier,
WILLIAM GODWIN. By G. F. Deane,

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INSANITY-HOW FAR A LEGAL DEFENCE. By I. Edwards,

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ON THE USE OF CHLOROFORM IN HANGING. By G. W. Peck,

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*Late Professor of Harmony in the Royal Academy of Music in London, Musical Director at Covent Garden Theatre, &c., &c.

NOTE-The friends of Judge McLean will find an error of fact regarding his nomination, corrected at the end of this number.

NEW-YORK:

PUBLISHED AT 118 NASSAU STREET.

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only justifiable-when it is employed as an instrumentality in behalf of the country, and of the whole country. When party becomes selfish-when it becomes ambitious-when it desires to rule for the sake of ruling, or for the profit of ruling, or because it wishes to set up its own idols in the high places of political worship, it must soon lose cast and character in the estimation of all good and wise men. Α combination of men to take possession of power for purposes of their own, less comprehensive and catholic than the common good of the whole nation, is something very different from a great and patriotic party. It is a conspiracy, and not a political party.

THE Whigs of the United States have a | to an end, and is really valuable-nay, is heavy responsibility resting on them in the approaching Presidential election. We hold that it does not admit of a reasonable doubt that they can elect ZACHARY TAYLOR to the Presidency if they will. It is equally clear to us, that if he be not elected, it will be because Whigs-some Whigsdo not possess that measure of disinterested patriotism to rise above mere party and personal, or sectional views and considerations. The trial of men's virtue never comes but when they are called on to maintain their principles at some sacrifice, or under some discouragement. Many Whigs are now in this category, and it remains to be seen how they will come out of the trial. It is the tendency of party organization to contract the horizon of Those who have composed the Whig duty to the country; at least, this is the party of this country have professed to effect on many minds. Party-the suc-unite for the purpose of promoting and cess of party-the exaltation of party become the absorbing objects of thought and desire. An ideal of what the party ought to be, what it ought to have and enjoy, and under what particular auspices its success and glory should be achieved, takes possession of the imagination, and sometimes quite shuts out other and higher considerations. It is forgotten, for the time, that party is properly only a means

maintaining certain great and distinctive principles, as being essential to the preservation of our form of government, and the advancement of the real interests and the true prosperity of the nation. When an election is at hand, like that which is now approaching, the proper question for every Whig to ask himself is, whether these principles are likely to be preserved and vindicated by our success as a party in the

election. If they will, the way of duty, as well as of party obligation, is plain. There may be many things not quite up to our expectations or desires. We may have seen many things in the management of the affairs of the party organization not at all to our liking. The wrong persons may, in our judgment, have taken the lead, to the discomfiture of wiser and honester men, and to the manifest disadvantage and discredit of the party. The candidate may not be the man of our individual choice; and we may think that those who have been chiefly instrumental in presenting him to us, and disappointing us of our preferences, have designed or hoped to promote some personal, selfish or sectional object or scheme of their own by his elevation. We may even entertain doubts whether the candidate we are to support agrees with us in all our notions about the particular means to be used-the particular measures to be adopted-for advancing the common weal. And, finally, some of us may indulge a shrewd suspicion that once in office his allegiance to country will be suffered in many things to outweigh his allegiance to party. But after all, what concerns us to know is, whether, if our candidate shall be elected, the distinctive principles which belong to us as a party will be likely to be maintained, and the affairs of government conducted with reference to them as a general basis of administration. If this is our faith and confidence upon a view of the whole ground, then we are guilty of a double desertion if we hold back from the support and effort necessary to the success of our candidate; we desert and betray at once both our party and our country.

Intelligent Whigs do not need to be informed what their principles are; but a summary statement of them cannot do the best of us any harm. The great doctrine which gave us our party designation was that of opposition to Executive usurpations. We hold it to be essential to the success of our free form of government that the President should be kept strictly within the limits of his proper Constitutional authority. Events have shown what fatal mischiefs do and will follow if that high functionary, with the vast patronage which attaches to his office, is permitted to overstep the Constitutional boundary

within which his duties lie. He may make himself at once despotic and irresponsible. We have actually seen a President, weak in everything except in the power of his office, involve the country in war, without and against its own will and judgment, for the purpose of conquest and the acquisition of foreign territory; and all this in the face of the Constitution, which expressly confides the power of declaring war to Congress. Thus, for two years and more, a nation, loving justice and loving peace, is chained to the car of a President, having a petty ambition to figure as the head of a people wise and powerful, carrying death and desolation to the heart, and over the hearths and homes, of an unhappy and imbecile neighbor, for objects of territorial plunder. This is one example to illustrate the strides which Executive arrogance will take if allowed to escape from the Constitution, and to appeal for the sanction of his acts solely to the will of an unreasoning ochlocracy. Whigs set themselves, first of all, at open war against any and all assumptions and encroachments of Executive power, under any and all pretences. From the period of General Jackson's accession to the Presidential office, under the machinations of the Democratic party, encroachment has followed encroachment in this office, with the full sanction and support of that party, until the Republic is on the point of being converted into the very worst and most unendurable of all forms of tyranny-the government of an irresponsible and proscriptive party, the dominant element of which is found in the lowest and worst classes of society, cohering by the principle of plunder, and giving a fearful energy to their power by concentrating it in the hands of a monocratic chief, elective by their suffrages, serving for a limited time, and bound and pledged to make their pleasure, and the gratification of their will and wantonness, the principal end and aim of his administration. In such a government, Congress is nothing but a convenient, or inconvenient, sort of medium interposed between the nation and the ruling chief, through which his decrees are made known by a formal registration, and through which also his necessary supplies are furnished. We Whigs want no such government as this. We desire to see the Congress restored to its original

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