Alexandria Gazette

Biography of Gen. Cass.
The New York Post—a leading Democratic
organ—has the following critique on the recent-
ly published book respecting General Cass:
"The Life of General. Cass, with his letters
and speeches on various subjects," has been
published by his friends in pamphlet form.
Some of the late biographies of this gentleman,
published in the newspapers which support him
as a candidate for the Presidency, take no notice
of his work entitled "France, its King, Court
and Government," which was no less than an
elaborate eulogy of Louis Philippe and the poli-
cy of his government, a policy as destitute of
wisdom as of justice, which ruled France by
corruption, and went on extinguishing, one af-
ter another, the liberties of the French people,
until at length it exploded in a general revolu-
tion. The present work is drawn up by some-
body who has the sagacity to see that the con-
duct of Mr. Cass in this instance needed some
apology. We quote from the pamphlet the ex-
cuse which his partizan makes for him.
"His work entitled "France, its King, Court
and Government," is celebrated for the variety
of its anecdotes, descriptions and reflections.
There is not a line in it adverse to the rightful
preference of the government of his own coun-
try over all other forms, but just the contrary,
again and again. A large part of it is devoted
to personal anecdotes of Louis Philippe and his
family: and perhaps it is in the commendation
which the writer so liberally bestows in these
quarters, that may have started the notion of
courtier.
"We must not suppose, republicans as we are,
that there can be no merit on the throne: least of
all, where the incumbent in this instance may
be said to be a self-made man in some respects,
schooled in that school which has raised more
men into greatness than any other—misfortune.
General Cass could not but fore-know that this
work, in all probability, would, in some way or
other, come under the eye of Louis Philippe
when in print. He, therefore, did well to carry
commendation as far as the truth would permit,
as well as describe, in colors as attractive as
they would bear, those court scenes which his
taste as a gentleman may have led him to ad-
mire in the royal palaces of France, where offi-
cial propriety obliged him to give his attendance:
those same palaces, in one of which Burke,
some fifty years ago, beheld a dauphiness of
France, "just above the horizon, glittering like
a star." Jefferson had been in those beautiful
scenes at the French Court, and knew the same
dauphiness which Burke has described in such
splendid diction, and in such a spirit of roman-
tic chivalry. Instead of conduct like the above
springing from any courtier like motive in Gen.
Cass, it should be carried into other and very
different account—to that of sagacity in serving
his country. Every minister at a foreign court
performs a duty of no slight import in endeavor-
ing, in all ways fit and honorable, to excite to-
wards himself personal good will and esteem,
on the part of the government and sovereign
where he resides. It tends to give him a power,
and who can undertake to say how far General
Cass's success in propitiating the good will of
the French Court, throughout its royal members
may have been among the causes which ena-
bled him to turn France aside from her first
purpose of co-operating with the great powers
of Europe in the dangerous work to his country
of the Quintuple Treaty.
The Post then goes on to say:
Such is the reason given for the flatteries be-
stowed by an American minister upon the in-
fat uated monarch and his instruments, whose
great aim seems to have been to tread out grad-
ually the remaining sparks of French liberty, and
to reduce the government, partly by a system of
direct bribery and partly by the terror of a power-
ful standing army and vast fortifications, built
as the intrenchments of tyranny, to the same
standard of abolitionism as the government of
Austria. Of all the diplomatic agents at the
court of France—servants of crowned heads,
from the ministers of the German principalities
to the ambassador of Russia—there was none
who stooped to administer this public adulation,
putting it on record with the attestation of his
name, but the representative of a nation which
claims to be the freest in the world, and fore-
most in sympathy with the oppressed, and in
detestation of their oppressors. The book, it
now seems, was written for an indirect purpose
its flatteries were bestowed for an object which
was not apparent in the pages of the work itself
the design of its author was to propitiate the
good will of the French court." that he might
the better "serve his country," and keep the
French King from assenting to the Quintuple
Treaty.
In this lies, in substance, the very objection
we make to Mr Cass as a candidate for the
Presidency. His expressions of opinion are but
masks of a concealed design. He does not utter
them that they may promote the cause of truth,
that he may assist in coming to a right conclu-
sion in controverted questions, but that he may
"propitiate good will." His book on France was
written, his partisan tells us, to "propitiate the
good will of the French Court:" his letter on the
extension of slavery, we all know, was written
to propitiate the good will of the slaveholders at
the south. His speeches on the Oregon and the
Mexican questions we may suppose to have
been dictated by a similar motive. "In indeed there
is no one of our prominent politicians who seems
to adopt opinions on public questions less from
a conviction of their soundness and their impor-
tance to the welfare of the country, and more
on account of their acceptableness to those
whose good will he desires to propitiate.
Mr. Cass must do as he pleases in regard to
the expression of opinions in cases where only
his individual interests are concerned. Our re-
public, however, has no need to maintain a
salaried flatterer at foreign courts. It occupies
too strong a position to tremble when the kings
of the earth take counsel together. If there
were no moral objection to so abject a proceed-
ing, we have never yet been driven to the ne-
cessity of employing an agent to beguile the
absolutists of the old world into the error that
their conduct is looked upon with approbation
by the great republic of the west.
For President, likewise, we want an honest
man—not a man who thinks of "propitiating
good will," when he should be thinking of what
is true, what is right, what is best for the coun-
try, and whose affairs he is chosen to adminis-
ter.