Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

not General Jackson's personal popularity; he never will have it. But though no victory has ennobled or veto illustrated his career, he is the author of the greatest reform attempted in this country, and a pilot who has weathered many a storm more fearful than battle. His personal deportment has been so unexceptionable, that he has probably not made an enemy, while Mr. Clay, in Senate, is his personal eulogist; and his friends have reason to be gratified with his conduct. All considerate and dispassionate Americans must acknowledge the sterling merits of his personal Chief Magistracy, which has disarmed opposition of most of its materials, as his measures have dissipated the elements of panic and excitement on which it throve. Calm but unfaltering, deferential yet inflexible adherence to principle, with dignity, both personal and official, he has engaged the attention, the consideration, and the approval of an increasing majority of the people, on whose intelligence and virtue he cast anchor. The worst is over, much sooner than might have been expected. The President put his Administration on an issue which many of his real, and all of his pretended, adherents considered fatal to him. But he has proved the wisest. Even if he had fallen it would have been with honor untarnished, and a good conscience to repose upon afterwards. But he has risen; he has succeeded; he will succeed; and Democracy now owes him a large debt of acknowledgment.

This is not the language of flattery, or solicitation, but of a calm, watchful, and even critical observer, anxious indeed for Mr. Van Buren's well-doing, but determined, and always ready to denounce him if necessary. It is vindication offered less for him than to the Democratic interest with which his Administration is identified, whose cohesion it is meant to cherish; not for the man, but for the measures of which he is the representative. It is contradiction of indiscriminate opposition, and discriminating support of the Administration, such as I deem the true ground of an independent American.

It is right to form a proper estimate of the talents, disposition, and qualifications of an individual with whose character as Chief Magistrate that of the country altogether, and the fate of republican institutions, is intimately connected. General Jackson filled so large a space in universal attention by his immense popularity, founded on military renown, civic distinction, and heroic temper, encouraging him to undertake and enabling him to achieve great exploits, that it would be trying to any man to follow such a predecessor, Mr. Van Buren announced his resolution to carry out the measures of the Jackson administration, concerning all of which he was no doubt confidently advised with when suggested, and many of which, it is supposed, he suggested himself. But in his inaugural address he gave it to be understood that ways of pleasantness and paths of peace are those he prefers. He made no promise to try to change his nature; but with that unassuming good sense, which is one of his principal characteristics, acknowledged the difference between General Jackson and himself; and accordingly has never attempted to imitate the man, while effectuating his measures. With similar principles, their manner of enforcing them has been entirely different. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Van Buren's mild, forbearing, quiet, and deferential, but tenacious mode of doing things, will not prove a surer way than the more conspicuous energy of his illustrious forerunner in the race of Democratic reforms. The beauty and strength of Mr. Van Buren's position is his unquestionable sincerity. We all feel that he is not attempting measures to which he has been converted, but pursuing a system to which he was uniformly attached. Brought up in the midst of what has been called the Albany Regency, he has always been perfectly pure of all lucrative designs, with which party rancor has never taxed him, and seems to be admirably fitted for contending with a great money power by his independence of it as a man of competent fortune honorably acquired; never a money-seeker, and having, at all times, while associated with many of its greatest votaries, kept himself entirely unspotted by that world. The Chief Magistracy of this vast Union has become a most complicated and difficult task; but, in addition to its great labors and perplexities, it was Mr. Van Buren's lot to encounter, at the outset of his Administration, obstacles, embarrassments, and even misfortunes, much severer than those experienced by any preceding President. During the first few months of his Chief Magistracy many began to be uneasy. Washington, with the organization of the Federal Government--Jefferson, with the civil revolution he headed, and the maritime troubles he could not get the better of, but left to his successor-Madison, at war with the greatest enemy we could have-Jackson, uprooting the deep-seated internal improvement system, settling the tariff, and making head against the Bank of the United States-had none of them difficulties to cope with equal to those which beset Mr. Van Buren in the suspension of specie payments, hostility of a thousand banks, and contrivances of their millions of debtors

and dependents, directed by a powerful opposition, flushed with hope of the overthrow of his administration. His trials were without example; and his manner of dealing with them was so different from General Jackson's overwhelming activity; there was something apparently so passive in Mr. Van Buren's personal resistance to opposition, such a total change from the Executive vigor we had become used to, and for several years upheld as the constitutional wand, that many of the President's best friends, supporting him, not for office, but on principle, began to apprehend that, if not unequal to the crisis, at least the mass would think so, as indeed many persons of all classes openly pronounced. Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison, considered patience and time-abiding reliance on popular intelligence as the true policy of Government founded on the sovereignty of the people. Most of us have witnessed the stupendous power and transcendant talents of Bonaparte, overcome at last by the less salient resistance of patient policy. And I believe it is now fast becoming a very general impression with the Democratic party, that the President they elected has proved himself eminently qualified to be a leader as well as Chief Magistrate, and that his system of government is working out success as effectually as if attempted to be achieved by a more towering administration. There is a time for all things. General Jackson's mode was well calculated for his time; but perhaps Mr. Van Buren's method may prove more efficacious at this period. Encountered in the very honey-moon of his connection with the Government by the most formidable complication of embarrassments, without faltering or over action, he instantly, calmly, and courageously met the exigency by a noble message to Congress, which, with great wisdom, virtue, and forecast, put his Administration before the country upon one plain, simple, and just principle, to stand or fall by. Leaving to Congress their share of a great responsibility, without the least encroachment on their province, he did not hesitate to take his own share. That principle was an Executive recommendation that the constituted authorities should put an end to all schemes of finance and sources of speculation, by closing forever that disastrous succession of Treasury experiments and ministerial contrivances, by which the Federal Government had perplexed itself, distracted the States, and violated the Constitution, by banks, first National and then State; and restoring the public treasure to what and where it was fixed by the Constitution, simply but absolutely separate Government entirely from banks, leave banks to themselves, and the community in their commercial exchanges to themselves, and collect, keep, and pay the public dues in good money by individual agency. This is one of those recurrences to first principles which is among the best lessons of Republicanism. It is a measure which must immortalize its author, whether he succeed with it or not: a conception marked with the enduring simplicity of genius, in harmony not only with our Constitution and institutions, but with the tendency and intelligence of our great mother country, and with the genius of the age-one of those indispensable reforms, like the separation of Church and State, whose adoption, sooner or later, is infallible, even though their authors fall before they ultimately succeed. Avarice, party prejudice, fear, and other unworthy passions, fell foul of it at once, as they do of all improvements, and the ballet boxes, from Maine to Mississippi influenced by banks, betrayed their power in furious opposition. It was an issue which seemed to be desperate, but which, it already begins to appear, was wisely ventured, and will be followed by a triumphant verdict of approval sooner than was anticipated.

Another seal of approbation to the course of Mr. Van Buren comes to us from the far South, as we write, in the following glowing tribute from Mr. Rittenhouse, of Alabama. The passage occurs in a speech replete with political knowledge, and expressed in a style of kindling eloquence that must soon win for its author a proud distinction. We regret that our limits oblige us to curtail it:

Could I consider him non-committal, who so frankly and early proclaimed himself on the new, and denounced Sub-Treasury? Could I consider him timid, who, though assaulted by more enemies, placed in greater difficulties, and submitted to a fiercer ordeal than administration ever yet encountered, has calmly and firmly carried out his policy, and smiled at the vindictiveness of his foes? Though threatened with committees of ten thousand armed enemies; though perceiving, in the hour of his necessities, squadrons of his earliest friends wheeling by States from his ranks, he dared hold on the march which both consistency and country enjoined. Sir, fate and malignity had scattered, like the savage ordeals of the olden superstition, burning ploughshares in his path that the darkness of our calamities had obscured. He had sailed, it was said, this sunshine pilot "these many summers on a sea of glory," and when the vessel of State was "weathering its stormiest capes," loudly was it prophesied that he would blanch and tremble in the untried tempests of the wild latitudes he had reached. But did he tremble? I, sir, I, with no friendly view, curiously watched that solitary man at the helm, (solitary, from his own vast and unshared responsibilities,) and when I beheld him amidst the uproar of the elements and the noise and the menaces of a distracted crew, calmly gazing at the card, and firmly directing the wheel-I could not withhold from him the tribute of my admiration, my esteem and my applause. Of humble parentage, endowed with no transcendent eloquence, wearing no soldier's laurels-he has nothing wherewithal to dazzle the multitude from their propriety; and the sustained confidence of his countrymen s ino feeble evidence of the justice of his cause. I do not exaggerate his claims, therefore, when I pronounce him the firm, courteous, and able statesmen; the very man for the times; the pure impersonation of principle.

[blocks in formation]

WE deem it a matter of extreme surprise that the important developments in Post Office Reform, which have so extensively agitated the British public for the last two years, should be so utterly unknown, as far as all practical information is concerned, to the American public. While the minutest movements of the great stock operations of London, though confined in their most extended result to a narrow circle of speculators, and bearing but remotely upon trans-atlantic interests—are chronicled with a species of feverish anxiety by our commercial press, and are read by thousands whose knowledge of such operations scarcely extends beyond the mysteries of financial phrase in which the account is enveloped; all notice of an utter change in the long established mode of Post Office communication in that country-which is somewhat analogous to our own—and a total revolution of the principles upon which it has hitherto been conducted; which, after thorough and searching discussion by the legislature, the press, and the public, is now about to be effected, and which is fraught with the most prodigious improvement not merely in commercial and social intercourse, but in civilization itself,is allowed to pass into operation unrecorded, unexplained, and almost unnoticed by any of our thousand and one American newspapers;-a painful commentary on that practical inefficiency for the useful and instructive which the unlimited devotion to party and personal politics has occasioned in a large portion of our press.

We propose to give in the present paper a succinct account of the projected Post Office Reform, its history, principles, and objects, reserving to a future occasion the important question of its applicability to our American System.

*Post Office Reform; its importance and practicability. By Rowland Hill. London, 1837.

Third Report from the Select Committee on Postages, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, August 13, 1838.

[blocks in formation]

In the whole range of human improvement and progress, there is no where to be found a more brilliant triumph of genius, than is presented by the present state of this great question of Post Office Reform in England. A few simple principles of arithmetic, proved to demonstration by calculations impossible to be shaken, called universal attention to a proposal that at the first blush might have been ridiculed as the reverie of a visionary; and soon, as a natural consequence, created such confidence in its details, as to make it revolutionize the whole of the existing system of government postage, and to subvert and utterly abolish not merely all the pre-existent machinery of post office management and revenue, but even all the pre-existing ideas, and the immemorial practice on the subject. This will be more fully understood, when we reflect that the British Post Office System, like our own, of which, indeed, it is the model, consists of an Executive, called the Postmaster General, who, assisted by his subordinates, manages the entire department. The mails are carried by contract, and the rates of postage for single sheets vary from two pence to one shilling and two pence sterling. The reception and distribution of letters, and the collection of the postage, are managed by postmasters in all the principal places, who are appointed by the government, and are responsible to it. The uniform practice of a long course of years had thoroughly consolidated the Post Office System of Great Britain, and rendered it in its workings almost as essential a part of the State as the Church, or the Army and Navy. Like every thing else connected with Government in the British Islands, it was, in all its branches, completely removed from the cognizance or control of the people whose interests it was professedly instituted to serve. Though the rates of postage had long been complained of as exorbitant and oppressive, and though Parliamentary Committees had the subject of their reduction repeatedly before them, the force of official opposition was found too powerful to be overcome, and there was about the same degree of disposition to gratify the public in this respect as there was to render the Peerage elective, to circumscribe the power of the Crown, or to grant universal suffrage, and the vote by ballot. Like every thing else in Great Britain, the main object sought to be attained was to get as much money as possible from the people, and to do this and lower the rates of postage were deemed altogether incompatible by the purblind intellect of officials, and so dismissed from contemplation. Meanwhile, as the leading mails were despatched throughout the country with punctuality and expedition, as no one individual felt himself more aggrieved than his neighbour, and as capacity to bear taxation was deemed the surest test of British loyalty, the system was permitted to go on from year to year in its usual track, and produced for the last twenty-five years a gross revenue of above twenty-two hundred thousand pounds sterling, or between eleven and twelve millions of dollars-of which income, about one million and a half of pounds was nett revenue.

In the year 1837, Mr. Rowland Hill, a private gentleman of London,

who had devoted his attention to the subject, published a pamphlet, the title of which will be found at the commencement of this article, in which he proposed to remodel the whole Post Office System by abolishing altogether the existing rates of postage, and with them the practice of charg ing double and treble postage, &c., according to the number of enclosures, together with all the complex arrangements for keeping the postmasters' accounts at the Department, and for the primary distribution of lettersand to substitute in their stead a uniform rate of postage, without regard to distance, of one penny for each half ounce, collected in advance.

This was a startling change; but the same first glance that contrasted it with the actual system, and pronounced it chimerical and visionary—(in this country all discussion of its merits would probably have been prevented at the outset by the cry of loco-focoism ! )—also perceived the prodigious improvement of its programme over the established order of things,and as fortunately Mr. Hill did not possess a name such as Slam, Bang, or Ming, to shout which in the public ear by the British officials and foes of improvement would have sufficed for an answer to his arguments, the general attention was strongly interested in the reasoning and facts, which led him to such extraordinary conclusions, and the result was ere long, as we have stated, a complete conviction of their accuracy in all essential particulars, and the entire practicability, as a consequence, of accomplishing for the country the unexampled amount of good which the adoption of the proposed changes could not fail to produce.

When we take into consideration the immense advantage to society which this reform would certainly occasion, in making the incalculable benefits of intercommunication accessible to masses of population hitherto deprived by a barbarous rapacity of taxation of almost all intercourse of thought, and placing that inestimable privilege as easily within their reach as the most ordinary comforts of life, the philosopher and the philanthropist will hail its general introduction, as bringing a new and potent element of civilization into play, and as creating a new era of blessing and improvement for the whole human family.

The first proposition by which Mr. Hill rivetted attention to his statements was the fact, that the revenue of the Post Office, notwithstanding the immense increase of population, commerce, wealth, education, and similar causes in Great Britain bearing upon it, had remained nearly sta tionary for above twenty years. As the financial prosperity of 1837 rendered it probable that a reduction of taxation would take place, it was obviously an important national consideration to select that subject of taxation in which reduction would give most relief to the people, with the least loss to the revenue. The test by which Mr. Hill proposed to find this tax was to subject each to an examination, as to whether its productiveness had kept pace with the increasing numbers and prosperity of the nation-from which the infallible conclusion would be, that the impost which proved most defective under the test would be that sought for. The Post Office revenue, as compared with the population in periods of five years, showed the following results:

« ZurückWeiter »