It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of
coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor sucked into office
by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry
straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of
the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf
of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze
of good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in
one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery
torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern! No,--there
will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free
institutions from himself and from his torturers.
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