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Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair, and their passing round the hat without catching even the greasy pence they courted, have very little to do with the great question to be decided at the next elections, except in so far as we may be justified in suspecting their purity of motive who could consent to such impurity of means, and the soundness of their judgment in great things who in small ones show such want of sagacity. The crowds they have drawn are no index of popular approval. We remember seeing the prodigious nose of Mr. Tyler (for the person behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets, and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud. Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, had some dignity given to his administration by the presence of Everett. But in this late advertising-tour of a policy in want of a party, Cleon and Agoracritus seem to have joined partnership, and the manners of the man match those of the master. Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the success in escaping memory achieved by the last of those small Virginians whom the traditionary fame of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness seemed to heighten rather than lower the grandeur of his station; his name will not be associated with the accomplishment of a great wrong against humanity, let us hope not with the futile attempt at one; but he will be indignantly remembered as the first, and we trust the last, of our chief magistrates who believed in the brutality of the people, and gave to the White House the ill-savor of a corner-grocery. He a tribune of the people? A lord of misrule, an abbot of unreason, much rather!

No one can object more strongly than we to the mixing of politics with personal character; but they are here inextricably entangled together, and we hold it to be the duty of every journal in the country to join in condemning a spectacle which silence might seem to justify as a common event in our politics. We turn gladly from the vulgarity of the President and his minister to consider the force of their arguments. Mr. Johnson seems to claim that he has not betrayed the trust to which he was elected, mainly because the Union party have always affirmed that the rebellious States could not secede, and therefore ex vi termini are still in the Union. The corollary drawn from this is, that they have therefore a manifest right to immediate representation in Congress. What we have always understood the Union party as meaning to affirm was, that a State had no right to secede; and it was upon that question, which is a very different thing from the other, that the whole controversy hinged. To assert that a State or States could not secede, if they were strong enough, would be an absurdity. In point of fact, all but three of the Slave States did secede, and for four years it would have been treason throughout their whole territory, and death on the nearest tree, to assert the contrary. The law forbids a man to steal, but he may steal, nevertheless; and then, if he had Mr. Johnson’s power as a logician, he might claim to escape all penalty by pleading that when the law said should not it meant could not, and therefore he had not. If a four years’ war, if a half million lives, and if a debt which is counted by the thousand million are not satisfactory proofs that somebody did contrive to secede practically, whatever the theoretic right may have been, then nothing that ought not to be done ever has been done. We do not, however, consider the question as to whether the Rebel States were constitutionally, or in the opinion of any political organization, out of the Union or not as of the least practical importance; for we have never known an instance in which any party has retreated into the thickets and swamps of constitutional interpretation, where it had the least chance of maintaining its ground in the open field of common sense or against the pressure of popular will. The practical fact is, that the will of the majority, or the national necessity for the time being, has always been constitutional; which is only as much as to say that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency. The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary was something which had entered the head of only here and there a dreamer. The theorists of the Virginia school would have dammed up and diverted the force of each State into a narrow channel of its own, with its little saw-mill and its little grist-mill for local needs, instead of letting it follow the slopes of the continental water-shed to swell the volume of one great current ample for the larger uses and needful for the higher civilization of all. That there should always be a school who interpret the Constitution by its letter is a good thing, as interposing a check to hasty or partial action, and gaining time for ample discussion; but that in the end we should be governed by its spirit, living and operative in the energies of an advancing people, is a still better thing; since the levels and shore-lines of politics are no more stationary than those of continents, and the ship of state would in time be left aground far inland, to long in vain for that open sea which is the only pathway to fortune and to glory.