Numerous public letters written by Mr. Buchanan in these years, 1851 and 1852, find their appropriate place here. They exhibit fully all his sentiments and opinions on the topics which then agitated the country.
WHEATLAND, near LANCASTER, Dec. 24th, 1851.
I am sorry I did not receive your letter sooner. I might then have given it the “old-fashioned Democratic” answer which you desire. But I am compelled to leave home immediately; and if I should not write at the present moment, it will be too late for the 8th of January Convention. I must therefore be brief.
My public life is before the country, and it is my pride never to have evaded an important political question. The course of Democracy is always straight ahead, and public men who determine to pursue it never involve themselves in labyrinths, except when they turn to the right or the left from the plain forward path. Madison’s Report and Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions are the safest and surest guides to conduct a Democratic administration of the Federal Government. It is the true mission of Democracy to resist centralism and the absorption of unconstitutional powers by the President and Congress. The sovereignty of the States and a devotion to their reserved rights can alone preserve and perpetuate our happy system of Government. The exercise of doubtful and constructive powers on the part of Congress has produced all the dangerous and exciting questions which have imperilled the Union. The Federal Government, even confined within its strict constitutional limits, must necessarily acquire more and more influence through the increased and increasing expenditure of public money, and hence the greater necessity for public economy and watchful vigilance. Our Constitution, when it proceeded from the hands of its framers, was a simple system; and the more free from complexity it remains, the more powerfully, satisfactorily and beneficially will it operate within its legitimate sphere.
It is centralization alone which has prevented the French people from establishing a permanent republican government, and entailed upon them so many misfortunes. Had the provinces of France been converted into separate territorial provinces, like our State governments, Paris would then no longer have been France, and a revolution at the capital would not have destroyed the Federative Republic.