More Proscription, 1856

More Proscription.

We stated a few weeks ago, that since the Foreign party had, and by the merest accident, obtained control of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, its brave, chivalrous, heroic drill Sergeants had dismissed from the employment of the Company nearly all those of the hands who would not bow the supple hinges of the knee to the tyrant Democracy, that thrift might follow fawning. We understand that Mr. William H. Lowe, one of the few employees who had then been spared, has since been notified to retire from the “Four Locks,” of which he is the keeper, on the 1st of January next. No charges were preferred against Mr. Lowe; none could be, for he is universally acknowledged to be one of the most prompt, faithful, and energetic Lock-keepers upon the whole line of the Canal. But he is a Whig – an Old Line Whig – and as such cast his vote for Mr. Fillmore, and that was his only offence, that was the sin for which there is no pardon. Base overtures were made to him by the hirelings of party to barter away his principles, to exchange his birthright for a guarantee that his situation should not be taken away from him; but he despised them all and maintained his integrity. His footsteps were dogged to the Polls and his ticket was watched by spies, but with manly independence he deposited if the man of his choice, and the emissaries of this cruel system of espionage hastened to report him to their superiors, who turned him out of employment and a home with a long and dreary winter before him.

And yet these are the men, and this is the party, that we are too look to for a true exposition of liberty in its most conservative, rational phrases or in its highest and best forms. This is the party that arrogates to itself the exclusive right and title to the name and the principles of good old-fashioned Democracy – that pretends to throw around the civil, religious, and political rights of the American citizen a perfect panoply of protection from every sort of infringement – and that assumes to read other parties long disquisitions upon the injustice of voting against the foreigner who refuses to recognize the necessity of a change of the naturalization laws, or the unconstitutionality of opposing the Catholic who obey a
higher power in temporalities than the organic law of the land. Can such a party be Democratic? By no means. It is a huge despotism and in the exercise of its power tolerates no difference of opinion. No man can either obtain or retain even employment as a laborer, under its regime of proscription, however honest, capable or faithful he may be, unless he first falls upon his knees in abject servility to all its dogmas, of in slavish submission to all its mandates. Away with such Democracy.