The Bolivar Bulletin

To many men age brings a briefer color once and more tender charity. The fierce passions and fiery hates of youth, its irascible prejudices and sweeping generalizations, are exchanged for the philosophic temper and forbearing speech. But there are men who grow more malignant with every year—the currents of whose blood, no longer bounding with generous passion, are converted into the feverish channels of gall that withers all the divine impulses of humanity—whose prejudices become stronger, their temper more dictatorial, their language more sardonic as they near the portals of the grave. Amid declining years they exhibit fiercer passions; with waning strength they flash forth into greater excesses of violent emotion and intemperate speech. The recent public career of the Hon. Thaddeus Stevens does not class him with those to whom age brings a revered because more generous and considerate manhood. He is called heroic by partisan friendship; but it is aught but heroic to insult the vanquished. He is called noble, but it is not noble to twit men with their former errors.

Mr. Stevens announced, in his speech at the banquet, that the war is not over. He still finds an enemy who presses with relentless vigor. Their object, he says, was "to rule one half of the nation as a nation of slaves, to introduce free trade into the continent, and to humiliate the North for its persistent advocacy of freedom." Their object now is to rule the whole nation by means of an oligarchy, by making the free negroes and copperheads contribute to their increased power, by increasing the number of their instruments, by thus seizing the reins of Government and introducing free trade to break down the industry of the free, which, by uniting with the already shining Northwest, they would have fair prospects of accomplishing. The plain English of all this is, that if the Southern States were back in the Union, their votes, added to what the Democratic party might gain in the North, would exceed the Radicals, would abolish inordinate protection, secure a united country, and vote down the Radical leaders and their proscriptive policy. But as we have the power, and can make the people believe that we are only legislating to exclude rebels from controlling the Government, we will do violence to our institutions, we will perpetuate discord, lest, if a majority be permitted to vote, they should consign us to private life.

This is precisely the theory on which Mr. Stevens acted when, at the time of the Buckshot war, he undertook to perpetuate the rule of a Whig minority, and had to escape popular indignation by jumping out of a back window. He informs us that the leaders of the rebellion have only been changed—that instead of Jeff Davis, and Lee, and Slidell, and Mallory, they have now Johnson, and Wool, and Seward, and Welles, and, of course, Stanton, and Dix, and Custer, and the thousand other fighting men, who, having periled life for their country, are now rallying around the President. Verily, this venerable politician must fancy there is no end to the popular credulity if the public can be made for a moment to believe that the men who put down the rebellion are now engaged in upholding it. With a persistence of hate that could only find lodgment in a breast poisoned by years of indulgence in malignant passion, he slanders the Cabinet of the man he was accustomed to traduce till the assassin's hand bore him beyond the reach of his venomous tongue. He prates about the assumption of regal power, to hide his own base scheme of Congressional usurpation over the lives and property of citizens of the United States.

But Mr. Stevens charges cowardice on his opponents, while frankly confessing the shortcomings of himself and friends. Naturally enough, he attributes the failure of the President to usurp unconstitutional functions to lack of courage, while he admits that "we feel an awe in approaching these lordly captives which unmans us." We do not deny the truth of the acknowledgment. Servility and domineering are both of the same stock. What is abject humiliation in the wretch prostrate at the feet of power will be exacting insolence in the same individual when clothed in the imperial purple. He will have no self-respect, and will exhibit no manhood when conquered, who, when victorious, is full of lordly assumption and arrogant dictation.

Mr. Stevens invokes the popular support to aid in confiscating the estates of the South and impose impartial suffrage. Less than this, he declares, shall never win his approval. He throws off the mask, and avows that the constitutional amendment was never intended as a settlement; that it is but "one step, a very mincing step, in the line of reform." The charge of Wendell Phillips, that it was but a trick, "a cheat," "a swindle," "a desire to bridge over the election," is acknowledged by the leader of the House, and without dissent from his colleagues. Those poor gulls who accepted it as a finality, who believed that false denials of Radical speakers that they were in favor of negro suffrage, who were deceived by the hollow outcry about one man in the South having more political power than one in the North, notwithstanding the power of a voter in Rhode Island is thirty times that of one in New York, must be amazed at the extent of their own credulity.

But Mr. Stevens declares that the future of this country, its preservation as a great empire, or its severance into fragments, depends on the wisdom and justice of their action. This is but partially true. This nation can survive the maddest folly of the Thirty-ninth Congress. Its imperial destiny cannot be balked by the venom of age or the fury of passion, by the crooked aims of the selfish or the foul designs of the base. Neither confiscation law nor disabling clause will long be permitted to mar its statute-book or disgrace its civilization. Its statesmen will undo the work of its politicians. Its people will repudiate the passion-guided policy of its merely partisan servants. — National Intelligencer.