The Daily Union

NO PARTY CAN BE DEMOCRATIC AFTER DESERTING DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES.

The coming election in New York excites a good deal of curiosity and of interest throughout the country. So far as the whigs of the State are concerned, there is at least in the South an almost universal repudiation of their dangerous avowals, and their still more dangerous purposes. Even the National Intelligencer has been at last constrained to denounce them. The democratic party is divided, and we have ceased to hope for the restoration of harmony to its ranks. The bitternesses between individual leaders have not been assuaged. Indeed, the abuse of the Albany Argus, and the malignities of the well known politicians whom it represents, have gone far to damage the cause of Mr. Bronson, and to increase the ranks of the friends of Mr. Seymour. But these influences will still manage to divert a number of votes into their own peculiar channel. It is astonishing, however, to observe how little effect the hostilities against the national administration, of the Albany Argus and its managers, have produced upon democrats throughout the country. We cannot now recall the name of a single democratic paper, of any standing, that does not treat these hostilities with indifference or with contempt. Nor is there a public man in the country, out of New York, who may have been disposed to sympathize with those politicians who still keep up these discontents, that has not changed his mind against them because of their calumnies upon Franklin Pierce, their desertion of their own principles, (because he supported them!) and at last their readiness to coalesce, as charged upon them, and not denied, with the meanest and most anti-American cabal which this country has ever seen. We have seen General Cass abused by these men for daring to defend President Pierce against the attacks of the common political foe. It is notorious that they were equally indignant because Judge Douglas would not lend himself to their purposes. So far, also, as interior New York is concerned, these causes have done, and are doing, their work upon thinking and right-minded democrats. The only parties whom the friends of Mr. Bronson please, after a few leaders, are saints like Greeley, patriots like Seward, and statesmen like Fred. Douglass.

We have been greatly amused by one of the peculiar and favorite war cries of Mr. Bronson's friends, who profess to be democrats, during the present contest in New York. They are most anxious to "rebuke" Franklin Pierce and his administration, and hence their cry against him, and their efforts to make their main point a point of assault upon him! And what, to this end, do these democrats do? They drop principles in order to gratify hatreds. The most of them voted against the Nebraska bill in Congress—their convention shied it and the issue involved in the present crusade upon religious toleration—and at this moment their candidate for governor is engaged in the work of trying to reconcile his own opinions on the liquor law, so as to satisfy another fanaticism! Now, we contend that every democrat in high office has been "rebuked" by just such men before. They are the foes of our principles; and you might as readily expect that because the whigs and the abolitionists traduce Mr. Pierce, he is therefore hostile to democratic principles, as to suppose that men who use the name of democracy, when they have deserted its principles, can "rebuke" those who stand fast by the constitution and the democratic creed.

The most offensive feature in the absolute governments of the Old World, to an American observer, is the fact that religion is regulated by law, and that the same power which oppresses the citizen in his civil rights prescribes the creed he must worship, and taxes him to support it. One nation maintains at as enormous expense a horde of ecclesiastical nobles, and compels all to pay for their support whether they follow the faith of the State or entertain other opinions. Another fastens a swarm of priests upon the masses; while another elevates the prevailing faith into the government itself, and governs by the church alone.

Such is the organized intolerance of despots and tyrants. Strange that, in substance and in practice, we should have a similar organization in republican America, justified, too, as perfectly consistent with our professions of liberty and of toleration.