Alexandria Gazette

GENTLEMEN JACOBINS—The National Intelligencer, in referring to the election to Congress from Pennsylvania, of Messrs. Wilkins, of Pittsburg, and C. J. Ingersoll, of the Northern Liberties, says: "We rejoice that bad principles should be represented by such individuals, who are liberal men in public and gentlemen in private life. It is only when Jacobins in principle are ruffians in person, that they excite unmitigated abhorrence."

We differ entirely from this opinion of the Intelligencer, which seems to us founded upon an extremely erroneous estimate of human nature, and moral responsibilities.

Jacobinism, pure and unmitigated, vile in principle, and ruffianly in appearance—as typified, for instance, by Dr. Duncan, of Ohio, is in our judgment, less mischievous, less contemptible, and less dishonest, than the soft and silken Jacobinism of C. J. Ingersoll or Martin Van Buren, whom we consider the chief of that particular sort.

The one declares itself always and in all places. It carries with it its own announcement, and to minds of any refinement, its own antidote. But the other, in the ordinary intercourse of life, is a hypocrite, as well as a knave—and passes and seeks to pass for what it is not, in order that it may in other places make profit thereby for what it is.

Dr. Duncan, at home and abroad, in public and in private, is a loud-mouthed, political brawler.

Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Ingersoll are as soft in speech as any Miss—as finical in attire, rather affecting fastidiousness in manners and in caste, and greatly shocked by any breach of the conventionalities of elegant life. They affect riches and rich men; they "take exercise in the saddle," as the Argus has it, when other men ride on horseback; keep late hours, and especially never seat at their table any of the countless Jacobins whom at the elections they so eagerly seek and grossly flatter. Yet, in politics, these silken, soft spoken, perfumed Jacobins, will go as far in the support of doctrines and practices subversive of the peace and good order of society, as the sans culottes or the rowdies of Tammany Hall; they will acquiesce in, nay prompt, resolutions and addresses of public meetings denouncing the possession of wealth as inconsistent with patriotism, and virtually as a disqualification for public trusts, and by words, votes and speeches, endeavor to cover with political opprobrium and drive from every chance of public life, those whom in private life they assiduously court, and to whose personal qualities, morals, education, integrity, and patriotism they certainly know no honest objection can be made.

The power for political evil of these hypocritical demagogues is greater than that of common ones—precisely as in social life polished vice is more dangerous than coarse and brutal immorality: the one at once disgusts and offends, the other lures on its victims by honeyed words and decent exterior.

Moreover, the position which the National Intelligencer would assign to such men is precisely that they most covet, and therefore, that offering most inducements to such a career. If the penalty of denouncing in resolutions or set speeches at popular meetings, and in popular addresses, those whose society, good will, and friendship, they perpetually courted, were the interruption of all intercourse and friendship, we should see and hear less of such patriotism; for, like prostitutes of another sex, who by the observance of religious forms, seek to reconcile the pleasures of sin with the benefits of piety—these political prostitutes are exceedingly desirous to reap at once the advantages of professing Jacobinism and practical aristocracy. We use this term, as our readers will at once perceive, in the sense so invidiously given to it by demagogues, and which makes it to include whatever is refined in intellect, art and science, or elevated by fortune and education, and which will not degrade itself, or the people, to the baseness of inflaming prejudice, or scattering the seeds of discontent between classes, having an equal inheritance in the free institutions, in the history, and in the hopes of a common country.

Aristocracy, as predicable of any portion of the institutions or social organization of the non-slaveholding States, seems to us a term so absurd, that we never hear it used by any one having the least pretension to understanding, without at once feeling we have to do with a false man—a man who will impute what he knows to be unfounded, in the hope of gaining from excited prejudice, what he could not obtain by merit, or from reason.

But we are going off from our topic, which was to express and assign reasons for our difference with the National Intelligencer, in its estimate of gentlemen Jacobins.—New York American.