1 Imaginary Presidents. April, decision. Our tariff is left ruinously inadequate; the public lands are absorbed and wasted by political speculators, creating dependent tenantries for themselves in the new countries; our Congress expends its energies in a detestable factious agitation; our steam navy must struggle unaided against British competition; and above all, we have no foreign policy except such as may be prepared for us by Lord Palmerston, and sub lish gentleman in Washington. Our Republican allies, who desire our commerce and our protection, are hemmed in by British cruisers, the gateway between ourselves and the Pacific is closed and tolled by England, and our citizens passing a free territory regularly searched and disarmed; and all this because a dozen or more industrious intriguers wish to have their names entered on the books of the Presidential Scrub Race of 1852. aristocracy of land and the aristocracy of money and trade, unite in a cordial hatred of popular reforms. They kill democracy by bribing all electors, and keep revolutions out of England by a system of game laws, by which the people are disarmed. They have an army in India, and create revolutions there; they create revolutions in every country in the world except their own, and for wise reasons, which every free trader, and every younger son of an English aristocrat, under-mitted to our Senators by an ingenious Engstands. But the world has suddenly discovered, and the Tories of England, as the reader will find in an article in our succeeding number, have let out the grand secret, that the existence of the British Empire through another half century is a problem of uncertain solution. France has two millions of armed citizens; the United States can in two weeks concentrate an army of one hundred thousand trained rifles and muskets simultaneously upon three or four points of her Atlantic coast. California has not less than sixty thousand fighting men always ready, more than all the fighting men in England and Scotland. can assemble and move a million. PrusRussia sia can summon every male adult citizen to arms, and find him ready with the musket. Germany is warlike from the Baltic to Trieste. Even Greece is at present a more defensible and warlike country than England. And with all that she depends upon Ireland, France, America, and Russia for more than one half of all the food that is eaten by her people, and without that food, a third of her population must be swept away by famine. By far the greater part of all food of her artisans comes from Ireland, and in Ireland she keeps a spy with a telescope to watch every cross road, an immense police army, and twenty thousand regular troops under arms. That is to say, the British Empire depends for its existence upon the contingency of an Irish rebellion, an American tariff, and the evil disposition of the Russian Autocrat. Highly necessary is it then for England to conciliate America, and if possible to keep us in a good humor with her and with ourselves. And yet she knows us too well to be at much pains to do that, even. Such is the inactivity and weakness of our Government, paralyzed by certain ingenious mesmerizers whose purpose it is to ride into power upon the wrecks of the great parties, nothing can be done with spirit or to rescue the nation from shame? Upon a Upon whom, then, should we fix our choice stuffed man of straw, an imaginary person, or upon some high-minded and ardent spirit, and the will, to put an end to this American, who has the magnanimity, the shameful and disgusting farce? Let it be he, whoever he may be, who can infuse life and courage into the councils of the nation; who can raise anew the fallen standard of Repubcanism; who can engage all the people in a true Union movement, a movement of industry and enterprise; who can revive the latent enthusiasm of the friends of home industry, of nationality, and of national independence, and show them that they are the powerful majority of all the people; whose boldness and firmness will, with or without war, give us all that war can give, a greater name, increased wealth, a firmer nationality, and the respect of the world. voice of the people? who has represented Is there a man in America honored by the truly the interests and the honor of the Republic? who adorns the councils of the nation by an eloquence founded upon wisdom, sincerity, and prescience? who in diplomacy represents at once the sagacious, the brilliant, and the bold? Must we go into the field and seek him at the furrow, or are his form and voice known to the people? Whoever, wherever he may be, we must find him; the Republic needs a head, the Union an incarnation. The events of the last few months have shown that the Presidency of the United | President, so he furnish them a rich emStates cannot be powerfully wielded by one ployment. to whom it falls by accident, or by mere succession. It is even doubtful whether an election by Congress, failing that by the nation, can confer a prestige and a power upon the successful candidate equal to the necessity of the situation. Without an able and truly representative man at the helm, there is no movement, no progress. THE NATION IS NEVER RIGHT UNTIL ITS FIRST CITIZEN IS AT ITS HEAD. Is there not a man in the nation, whose election to the Presidency will give joy and satisfaction,-a sense of security and hope? God and man, nature and necessity are against us until we put our best man in command. It is not to him, whoever he may be, that we owe any thing; as individual citizens we owe him nothing; he may even have stood in our way, and may have seemed to injure and overshadow some of us;-that is nothing here nor there; we must elect a real and not an Imaginary President, or resign our power, and so it will be by a natural necessity. Every business must have an active agent to control it, every ship must have a master to guide it in the storm. Until the right agent is chosen the business languishes; until the right master is appointed, the ship is badly navigated and the crew are mutinous; until the natural leader of the Republic is in the first office in its gift, the Republic languishes. Not once in a thousand years does it happen, that two men can be found in the same day in a great nation, fit to be intrusted with the highest office. A hundred may perhaps be found equal to the business of the office, and fifty of the hundred perhaps who can guide and govern men; but that is not all that is needed for the Presidency of the United States;-character, power of will, personal virtue, and the power too of enforcing respect and acquiescence, and commanding the favor of the million, should go into office with the President of the Great Republic. "Principles, not men," is the spurious maxim of some cunning politicians. For then it should be, "Offices, not men." Of 'principles' those men are quite innocent, God wot, who cannot distinguish a great man from a great booby, a tall fool from an Agamemnon, who care not if the Devil be "We owe the Presidency to Jones," say some, as a reward for his services to the nation, and to the Republican cause. An obvious error. The Presidency of the United States is not a Christmas box nor a pension. If the nation owes any service to Mr. Jones, my good democratic friend, and he will so far humiliate himself as to show value received, let him have a pension, a gift of public lands; but neither Mr. Jones nor his friends are fit to exercise power if they look for any thing of the kind, nor can any such plea be offered by them upon any occasion where the Republic is mentioned with the respect due to it. If any man has identified himself with the glory and genius of the American people, and can wield the highest power as an enthusiastic and high-minded Republican, and not as a mercenary agent or the stipendiary of a faction or a class, he would laugh to scorn your base offer of the Presidency to him as a reward, or a pension. What right have we, a dozen or twenty private citizens, to offer the Chief Magistracy of the Republic as a payment? Away then with the ridiculous plea, that Jones or Smith must have the Presidency because they have worked for it! It is not in us to give it, nor in him to earn or receive it. The natural head of the Republican and National Party must stand foremost as the Representative, not of union in the abstract, but of a national policy, domestic and foreign, that will make union as necessary as life. He must be the suggestor and the guide of great measures, to be carried through Congress, if necessary, by the severest struggles; the Congress, loaded with corruption and old prejudice, will, ten to one, fight against the people and their man. Whatever the violence of opposition, and the fury of calumny, he must with a firm will, relying upon the sole foundation of power, the respect of the people, carry his measures right on to their performance. Not a question must remain in any man's mind of his intention or his sincerity. There must be no secresy, no diplomacy with the nation. He will draw about him the ablest and most trustworthy citizens of the Republic; the fittest to stand by and work the dangerous machinery of power. No thought of elections must enter his mind; his re-election is secured by his conduct. Imaginary Presidents. April, The Presidency of the United States is and despots of the old world; establish the perhaps the most difficult office in the world freedom and confirm the prosperity of the to fill, and requires the greatest moral and southern third of the continent, where intellectual power to hold it successfully; our citizens are received with open arms, and it will not have been successfully held and offered every advantage by the Spanish unless it is held for a successor. ful, well-managed political party, led by first to the manufacturing industry of the South; A success- Republics; give a new and powerful impulse class statesmen, should be able to hold office open to the use of all the world the exhaustfor an entire generation, and carry their sys- less mineral wealth of Pennsylvania, of Virtem of policy into its full effects. and better California;) give a new impulse ginia, and of Central America, (the new to the commerce of the world by furnishing to all markets a vast and profitable surplus of manufactures; and above all, re-establish the honor and glory of the Republican name, now fallen into disgrace and weakness, and by its fall in America, retarding the great movements of human progress abroad. If the Whigs go out of office at the next election, confusion and weakness may follow them for twenty years longer; possibly they may become extinct as a party, and politics fall upon new issues, more exciting and popular than those which create party lines at present. If they can find a suitable candidate, and can join a powerful and popular name with his in the Vice Presidency, to meet the danger of his death, power will perhaps remain in Whig hands for, a full age of man. Many distinguished names might be mentioned of men fully equal to the business of high office, and who would do creditably what the place requires; but we are not here to interest ourselves with comparative merits. We seek to find not him who on the whole is the most available, but him who is the candidate without comparison. the first citizens of the Republic are put at Nothing of all this can be done, unless the head of its affairs, and the first man of them all in the chief seat of power. natic, an able rascal, a vain rhetorician, a A popular simpleton, an industrious facunning diplomatist, a stipendiary, an honest ignoramus-these are not the characters to lead the new age, or give a majestic forward movement to the great Republic. Good friends, good men, honest and inWere the true man found, the sons of commit when you cast the fatal, irrecovtelligent citizens, consider what a folly you mischief and confusion would unite, and con-erable vote that puts a weak, a silly, a centrate all their powers for the sake of de- false, or a knavish man at the head of this feating so dreadful an antagonist. But their nation. The power of the place is great; union against him and his friends would be the greatest capacity cannot satisfy it, and of itself a benefit conferred upon the nation. it has this peculiarity, that it must be used. The distraction of parties corrupts and weakens the political morality of the people; a dozen abominable little factions, fanatical, selfish, narrow and ignorant, do nothing for the nation but mischief. Let them be united in opposition, the meaner motives disappear. A legion of devils are cast out, who before delighted to animate the members of a disjointed carcass. An able succession of twenty years, with a great policy, continued through a line of national and truly Democratic Presidents, would in all probability annihilate the British Free Trade faction, crush the British-born disunionist factions of the North and of the South, re-establish republican industry, and confirm republican alliances all the world over; secure for this nation the love of all nations struggling for liberty, and strike salutary terror into the reactionists If not used, it works a proportionate mischief. An imaginary, do-nothing President, or a stuffed show President, is not merely a clog and a disgrace; the mischief he unconsciously accomplishes is just equal to the unused power and legitimate responsibility of the office. If the nation does not progress, or as we say, "go ahead," all that Its existence as a Union depends upon its while it goes backward, and falls in pieces. national and harmonious activity--its activity and movement as a whole. We cannot sit still; it is death and ruin to do so, but we cannot move without a competent leader to guide our motion. If we do not extend, improve and protect our agriculture, other nations will compel us to look to them for the necessaries of life. our manufacturing industry to be oppressed and outdone, another nation more enterprisIf we allow ple there is no choice between extension, growth, and progress, and an enterprise directed outside and beyond itself, or internal dissension and decay. The household must have outdoor business to look to, or they will quarrel and ruin all. ing is immediately the commander of our of victory, and lets in the adversary to spoil purse, and puts us in her debt; agriculture and destroy, to appropriate and to oppress, is choked and trade embarrassed. If we is it not a deluded, a weak, a slavish, and a neglect to keep up our mining interests, iron, contemptible nation, ready for civil war and coal, lead, and copper come to us from dismemberment? For the American peoabroad, and we are farther narrowed, impoverished and restricted, and forced back upon the wilderness. If we neglect to extend our empire, to colonize and subdue by all just means the savage hordes upon our border, we are distressed and ruined along our border. If we neglect to keep up friendly, profitable and exclusive alliances with neighboring Republics, a foreign power steps in and we are shamed and excluded, our commerce endangered, our peace imperilled, a bar of separation raised between ourselves and our brothers. Existence and progress are correlatives: the one is nothing without the other. Is not victory the crown of existence? Who wishes to live who does not also conquer the evils of life, and make himself in some degree master of his own destiny? And the nation that loses sight Southern statesmen are jealous of the central government, and well they may be, for now it is the prey of factions. Let them put fire and nationality into it, and they will no longer have any cause to fear it. A central government that has nothing to do, no generous or useful enterprises in hand, is a nest of corruption, and a hot-bed of faction; what else should it, or can it ever be? Will the powers of nature lie still and wait our pleasure? Will the laws of human nature suspend themselves to please us, and give us a good time? THE TWO THOMPSONS-G. P. AND P. P. ANOTHER CHAPTER ON "CIVIL DISCORD DUTY FREE." ENGLAND has the felicity of possessing two | she has assigned herself, of sending out her Thompsons-Thompson the Aristocrat," population to die, as it is hoped in the end at home, "Thompson the Demagogue," they will, under the guns of honest people." abroad. So wrote P. P., the Thompson at home, (M. P. from Blackheath,) a Tory, in the London Morning Chronicle of Feb. 1st, 1848. "Thompson the Aristocrat" at home, writes: "To England the policy is clear, (if she is to have any policy,) of promoting by all G. P. carries out the "policy" of P. P. legitimate means, the separation of the Nor- The two abolitionists, representing two thern from the Southern (United) States." phases of British humanity, the Tory and This is P. P. Thompson, a Tory of the old the Radical, "work together for our good;" school, and rich. He is an M. P. from Eli-one at home, safe in England, the other, not otvale, Blackheath, England. He writes, farther: "The slave-breeding mind has conceived the idea of conquest, to which, in its own words, the successes of Rome are to be child's play. It is clear, England must take one side and her enemy (America) the other. She (England) must take the lead in the propagation of the European continent of the principles which bind nation to nation, and leave America to do the work quite so safe, in America. One hatches the All now, the Unions of States, in South and cause of all men, dastard editors, and hireNorth America, have forbidden such free ling scribblers, who can only, like serpents, entrance, and enforced a tariff. agents in South América, and in Central me without measure, creep away to their English be traced by the slime they leave, blacken America, have worked, and are now working dark rooms, and concoct lies and slanders with all the energy of devils, to break up against an innocent man." these Unions, and their amiable labors have been crowned with success. hatred of your genuine Briton for every The mortal thing republican, has supplied the energy necessary for the work. Other means have been used, but it is as often a labor of love as of gain. Certainly, practical G. P. Thompson is emissary, that ever the people of America the most audacious rascal of an agitator and let live among them. He coolly informs us, as if it were a merit, that he has left wife and children at home, safe in England, and The destruction of the North American or hope of reward; and the purpose of his has come over to America, without reward Union of Republics, whose existence is such coming is to commit the greatest crime of a potent obstacle to the movements of British which man is capable, to create civil war, commerce, is a work of time, and requires slave insurrections, to set one half the every variety of agency. The grand lever is ple against the other half, to blight the hope the slavery agitation. When free-trade fails, of the world, and doom three millions of the the slavery agitation is the stand-by. G. P. negro race to barbarism and a war of exThompson, the other Member of Parlia- termination. That is the object of disinterment, the Thompson abroad, the practical Thompson in America-supplies what is left undone by theoretic Tory, P. P. Thompson, M. P., safe in England. One of the New-York dailies informs us that somebody has been denouncing practical G. P. Thompson, the British freetrade lecturer and abolitionist in Massachusetts and New-York, as an aristocrat. This is a curious mistake, whoever committed it; whoever denounces G. P. as an aristocrat, is clearly ignorant of P. P. We have described and quoted P. P.; let us now quote and describe G. P. G. P., in a speech of his at Syracuse, declares that "for twenty-five years he has devoted himself to the human race." So too have the devil and the razor-strop man. peo ested G. P. Thompson's visit. Practical G. P. is a much cheaper and more 'available' man to satisfy the ravenous maw of the your rich Tory, unpractical P.P. Thompson wolf of commerce, British Free Trade, than at home, safe in England. cuse, "Oh, that is it, indeed-a foreigner !— "I am a foreigner," says G. P., at Syraso are your missionaries." practical G. P., go among barbarians to teach Missionaries, O indefatigable and most obedience to the doctrines of Christ; you come among a Christian, civilized people, to with a vengeance; and it is a source of preach ruin and death. You are a foreigner astonishment to all thinking men, that your abominable foreign quackeries of free universal British rule, have not long since trade, servile war, division of the Union, and met their quietus. But no; there is no public opinion of force or courage enough to crush any thing British, were it a British dog run mad, and biting every American he met. The principles of Free Trade and Universal Rights would certainly protect him, could he show a British brass collar. "Instead of being a hireling, I have labored for nothing, says G. R., and have never received for my labors any thing to make me richer than I was when I entered the lists to do battle for human rights:" which is a comfortable assurance, to a thoughtful mind, that a desperately wicked and destructive course of life is at best, unprofitable. Our emissary is one of the true breed; he works for love, it seems; your genuine destructive can," continues G. P., "I am an American." "In all that makes a man a true Ameriis content with mischief: virtue is its own "Is it American to hate tyranny and battle reward, and so is G. P. Thompson's agi- against oppression?" Aye, truly, most indetation. Heaven send it payment in kind! fatigable G. P., it is so, and of all the tyran"Yet," continues G. P., "when, denying nies in this world, commend me to that of a myself the companionship of those I love," servile public opinion backed by the terrors (his wife and children, disinterested soul!) of Free Trade, and a toady press. Against "I come to this land to speak for the common that accursed tyranny America has a long |