The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1868-08-17
SPIRIT OF THE PRESS.
EDITORIAL OPINIONS or THR LRADIEa JOURNALS
UPON oURRKES ToPICs-ooMPmRD EvRRr
DAY FOB THE EVENING TELEGRAPH.
Is MIR. seymour a statesmanl

The adversary is engaged at this present
moment in vaunting the statesmanship Of
Horatio Seymour. Let us see what are Mr..
Seymour's claims to be- styled statesman
Statesmanship must be made up of character,
study, and experience. Napoleon was states
man by nature; John Stuart Mill (betore en-
tering the House of Commons) by study; Pal
merston by experience. Mr.. Seymour has
never held a national office, aud so far as ma
tional politics are concerned he cannot be
statesman by experience. In the State offices
he has held, his only evidence OF statesman
ship is his veto of prohibitory liquor law. 1t
does not require a gifted imagination to con-
ceive that General Grant, in the same circum-
stances, must either have shown equal states
manship by vetoing it, or superior statesman
ship by signing it, He might have done more.
He could not have done less.
Those who have ever troubled themselves to
learn anything about politics will not accuse
Horatio Seymour of being statesman by
study. He never studies. If he did he could
not lie to so great advantage as he does in his
public speeches. He skins the surface OF his
tory for half truths, knowing
That a lie which is half truth is ever the
blacBest of lies,
That a lie which is all lie may be met and
But a lie which is part a truth is harder mat.
ter TO fight.
If he stumbles on a whole truth, he cuts it
in two, dropping the kernel and feeding on
the husk. Let us see how far his statesman
ship would have availed us. During the agl-
tation of the slave question, he recommended
throwing open the national Territories to sla-
very, so that the slave power could have been
strengthened in the Senate by the votes of all
the present and future States west OF the Mis-
souri, river, from Texas to British America.
He argued, also, that shareholders should be
allowed to sojourn with their slaves, for all
transient purposes, in the free States, to stop
with them at the springs, and to travel with
them for pleasure or business. He would
have given Shareholders eternal sway over the
national Territories, and temporary sway
wherever they went in the Northern States.
Suppose Mr.. Seymour's craftsmanship had
prevailed, would the slave power have been
less tyrannical! Would the ultimate success
of free principles at the North have been less
certain Would not Mr.. Seymour's poliJy
have strengthened the Rebellion in advance
and so insured the final and irrevocable disso.
luton of the UnionP
Then Mr.. Seymour advocated the Crittenden
Compromises. e., he wanted the North,
after electing President on the basis of ''no
further extension of slavery" to agree that if
the South would haul down the Rebel flag,
and allow Mr.. Lincoln to be President, and the
Union TO stand, then Mr.. Lincoln should con-
sent to the indefinite extension of slavery, and
the voters who elected him to the perpetual
abandonment of their principles. Had this
blunder been followed, it would have been
established that the defeated party at Presi-
dental election can always reverse the politi-
cal effect of the election by threatening to Sc
cede. This is Mexican statesmanship-
not American. 1t is the craftsmanship
of brigands and rioters, not of Senates
and Parliamentary bodies; of rutiauism-
not Democracy. If Mr.. Seymour had
ever studied much, he would not have placed
himself so exactly on par with men who
have never studied at all. But if Mr.. Sey-
mour had studied the Crittenden Compromise
so far as to inquire whether the South were
willing to accept ito remain in the Union
provided the successful party should repudiate
and back down from the principles on which
the people elected Lincoln-he would have
found that the South nowhere voted for it,
and would never have accepted it. Hence,
Mr.. Seymour's craftsmanship is not that Of
study, even Of the most superficial kind
Again, at the outbreak of the war, Mr.. Sey
mour declared that he had no faith that the
Union could be maintained by force; that he
had examined the Montgomery Constitutions
that it was better than our own; and that the
better way was for New York and the other
Northern States to come under it. Was this
craftsmanship I? Is the cringing spaniel, the
fawDing cur, the whipped and yelping hound,
our beau ideal of craftsmanship
Again, in 1923, he denied the constitu-
tionality of the Draft laws, argued that q
Union restored by coercion would be as great
a crime as the Rebellion, taught that only
Republicans should fight for the Union, and
contended that emancipation was the death
knell of the Union. In 1864 he, in the Chicago
platform denounced the war as a failure in the
midst of the smoke and heat of the contest,
encouraging the Rebels to persevere though
they were already whipped, and predicting
defeat for the Union armies who were already
victorious. Was this craftsmanship Had
the country assenied to Seymour's doctrine
in 1860, that the Rebellion could not be sub
dued, or in 1864 that hostilties should cease,
our Union would have been dissolved, aud the
Northern States Would have been plunged
into war among themselves by the efforts
of Seymour and his friends to carry out the
policy he had advised of seeding from the
Union and Joining the Confederacy. In these
commissions, the army OF the independent
Rebel Confederacy under Lee would have
stood ready to march into the Northern States
and aid the efforts OF the Democrats to carry
these States over to the Confederacy and
slavery up to the Canadian line. In short
Seymour's policies would have given us a
united and independent South, divided and
conflicting North, and country at war from
one end to the other, after all hope of re-
storing the Union or destroying slavery had
disappeared. Since Seymour's policies indi
cate neither experience nor study of states
manship, il he be a statesman he can only bt
so by character, having been born such. Bu
people who are born to the possession of grea
wealth of any kind, financial or intellectual
seldom live TO the age of ffty-seVen years
without making it manifest. Mr.. Seymour
however has never proposed policy or inau
gurated measure of any kind. He has beeI
of no M m Z