May it not serve a good turn toward arresting this torrent of innovation, to present to the leisure meditation of those who are embarking upon its stream, a few memorials of a bygone day, quite as distinguished as the present for the intensity of its political ardors and the absurdity of its excesses, but, fortunately, more harmless and amiable in its temper? Is it not worth while to attempt, by these playful sketches of the past, to lure the angry combatants into a smile, and, by showing them the grotesque retribution which history inflicts upon distempered parties after a few decades of oblivion, to beguile them into some consideration of the predicament in which they may leave their own renown? May not all sober-minded lovers of their country contemplate with some profit the _morale_ of a picture--even as light and extravagant as this--which represents the engrossments of parties who fancied that the destinies of a great nation hung upon the plots and counterplots of their busy ferment,--which engrossments, with all their concomitant gravities and glorifications, twenty years have shriveled into the dimensions of a pleasant farce--a little stage imbroglio of comic conceits and fussy nothings?
That intrepidity of absurdity which no responsible individual would dare to countenance in his own conduct, and which is only possible to organized bodies propelled by the ardor of party enthusiasm, is a fact in human action worth the study of the philosopher. By some unexplored tidal law, parties would seem to move through successive ebb and flow toward a final culmination of mischievous extreme, each refluent wave returning with heavier mass, until the accumulated weight of madness and folly overtopples, breaks, and dissolves in noisy foam. As we have a computed cycle of a money-crisis, the known result of an increasing and rapid prosperity ill used, so also we have the regularly recurring political crisis, the result of increasing party-power abused by rash and insolent presumption upon its strength.
This century has run out its three periods of twenty years. The first ended in the total absorption of all differences of opinion, bringing a stagnant calm upon the waters of ancient strife. The second culminated in a revolution that shook a great party out of its seat;--a revolution which these annals were designed to illustrate. The third period has wheeled through its course, to work another downfall and another revolution more notable and significant than either that have gone before. The fourth, let us hope, may find a nation restored to reason;--a great united Republic, tried and purified by the experience of dangers incurred and surmounted, and by an awakened patriotism successfully asserting the predominance of the good sense and virtue of the people over the factious spirit that ministers to personal ambition, and the vanity that seeks renown in innovations upon either the principles in which the Union was formed, or the sentiment by which it is to be preserved.