false issues and explanations. "The vile person will practise villany, and his heart will work iniquity to practise hypocrisy and utter error against the Lord; to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also of the churl are evil. He deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right."* What a graphic picture! as if the original were some brawler during an election canvass, or some honorable in the halls of the national legislature, or some patent journalist in our days! It is vastly easier, and more convenient, to resolve all distress and the bad working of the social machinery, into some such palpable cause, as existing and obnoxious classes, than to trace it through the complexities of those questions and problems, which, in every age, have taxed the energies, and awakened the sympathies of the best of our race, and which are occupying the meditations of the profoundest thinkers of our age. The words capital, monopoly, &c. have a magic power over the passions of a populace. In the frenzy they produce, even a calm hearing of difficulties will not be allowed, and a plea for the possible conscientiousness of a particular class is deemed sycophancy to power. Even without the use of words, a significant symbol, speaking to the eye, and through the eye to the heart, will work all the desired purposes of deception. The red bonnet of French Republican equality, which the good hearted Louis once assumed on the colonnade of the Tuilleries, the liberty pole, log cabin, the black cockade, the tricolor flag, will readily recur. These embody ideas full of deceiving flattery, and of incomparable potency with the people; and so songs of execrable sentiment, and wretched poetry, married to music, and sung along the streets by children of a larger or smaller growth, are sweet to the ears of the demagogues as the ribald rhymes of the reign of terror to the Jacobin and sans culotte. If a man has resolved on making power over the people his idol, he must bring himself to offer the incense of such filth at the shrine.

But the demagogue flatterer and deceiver is also at last the destroyer of the people. "They that are led by them are de

Isa. xxxii. 5-7.

stroyed." The dupes of flattery and deception are destroyed first in principle, then in happiness, by the discontent and envy which the wiles of the demagogue have engendered, and then finally, they are destroyed literally, and in masses, by the actual collisions and fratricidal conflicts into which their furious and ungovernable passions, thus terribly stimulated, ultimately conduct them. Of the demagogue, pre-eminently above all classes of the wicked it may be said, "wasting and destruction is in his path; his mouth is full of cursing, and deceit and fraud; under his tongue is mischief and vanity; he sitteth in the lurking places of the villages; his eyes are privily set against the poor; he lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den; he lieth in wait to catch the poor when he draweth them into his net; he croucheth and humbleth himself that the poor may fall by his strong ones." Retiring or turning traitor at the crisis his arts have brought about, the hollow hearted hypocrite is willing remorselessly to ride into power, even on the foaming* waves, which engulf the deluded thousands he first deceived and then betrays. The starvation which a disorganized state of society, or a violent rupture between capital and labor, entails on those who have no hoarded resources adequate to the exigency, he has neither ability or disposition to relieve; but only plies with redoubled energy, amidst this anarchy, his measures of deception and ruin, as the buriers amidst the plague are said to increase in ghostly glee as their terrible trade is active. "These never failing brood of sedition mongers, these vicious and therefore unprosperous adventurers, who are always ready to turn the misery of the ignorant into weapons of their own ambition," have no resources to remedy the evils they create. The lack of employment, resulting from withdrawal of capital, and the consternation and instinctive sense of self-preservation of the affluent, he has no scheme ready to supply. But, he takes occasion therefrom to add intenseness to the already excited passions of his victims, till maddened and reck

• Political and social agitations in Scripture are called by a word derived from ános, the surge of the sea, "σakɛvotes". Acts xvii. 13. "Raging waves of the sea foaming out their own shame." Foam, resulting from agitation, is peculiarly unsubstantial, every one knows.

less they rush on to their own fate, involving themselves and their antagonists in ruin. His beautiful theories of universal peace and prosperity, to be secured by a re-adjustment of society on his principles, prove empty bubbles; or, like the fabled apples of Sodom, when seized by the thirsty traveller, his promises turn to poison, and his prophecies are found "lies spoken in hypocrisy." "The prophet that speaketh lies, he is the tail." Like the scorpions of the Apocalypse, "there were stings in their tails." And may we not add, in the fearful language of inspiration, "they have a king over them, the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon," in ours, the Destroyer.

The apostle Peter describes such, as "with feigned words making merchandise of those whom they deceive. Them that walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness and despise government. Presumptuous are they, and self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. When they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh and much wantonness, those whom they cause to perish in their own corruptions." Flattery and deception constitute the "But the end of these things is death."

means.

That "glorious old dreamer," Bunyan, whose visions seem, in comprehensiveness and life-like delineation, almost inspired, has not forgotten or omitted the demagogue. He gives his portrait in the exquisite episode of "the Flatterer and his net." His appearance was "like to the shining ones." "Satan transformed into an angel of light." But his true color was black, representing the deep enormity of his character and arts. He lured the pilgrims from their path, by delicate and plausible flatteries, as the demagogue does the dear people, till they found themselves in the inextricable meshes of the net he had spread for them. So, with talents sometimes "like archangel ruined;" with ambition insatiable as the arch-destroyer, yet veiling all, the deceiver of the people will practise the same villany, to end in the same ruin. In honeyed phrase, and with a mouth smoother than butter, oily and elastic, he will lure a community, or if he can, a nation, by his flattering lies, and then, with demoniac exultation, laugh over his success, though

the groans of murdered millions, and the sighs and tears of survivors mingle with his rejoicings!

Our train of thought has led us to contemplate the ultimate results of the arts of the demagogue upon others, not upon himself, the destruction of the seduced, not the seducer. Else, we might dwell a moment on the doom of the demagogue, deceiver and destroyer. In a common destruction at last, whatever temporary success his tricks may procure, the deceiver and deceived shall lie down. But in its lowest depths, hell has a lower deep, assigned to the lost among mankind most assimilated in character to the great Destroyer himself, whose flatteries and lies first wrought the ruin of our race. "Hell from beneath will be moved at the coming" of these peers of the realms of everlasting ruin. "Art thou become like one of us?" will ring in the ears of the deceiver, as he reaches "his own place." What must have been the meditations of Marat, in that bath which the dagger of Charlotte Corday incarnadined with his blood? or, the reflections of Robespierre on his way to the guillotine, where he had previously sent so many? These, were they recorded, would give us but faint types of the actual waking of the lifelong deceiver of the people, amidst the deluded victims he has destroyed!

Such are the arts and ultimate results of the demagogue, "the prophet that speaketh lies;" the "tail" of the social structure, the flatterer, deceiver, and destroyer of the people, alike in Israel and Athens, in republican Rome and republican America. "Look on this picture. Is it like?" Does any one say, whatever applicability such a portrait may have in other portions of the world and periods of civilization, we have no reason of apprehension from this source here, and in our day? Had we thought so, we should not have attempted this delineation. The portraits drawn from nature, by infallible wisdom, suit every age of time and every country. The Bible is read to little purpose, or edification, if we consider any of its great principles or portraitures of character obsolete. "In these is continuance, and we shall be saved." Designed indeed, primarily, to conduct immortal man to eternal life, by revealing Christ as the way, the Scriptures are still profitable for all things, to guard us as individuals and communities from temporal perils, VOL. I.-27

to confer upon us the richest social blessings, gild our pathway through "this present evil world," as well as conduct us finally to a better; the best manual for the statesman, as they are the only guide for the sinner. The great lessons of Scripture suit every period of time, and every degree of latitude, where human nature exists, and the vices and perils incident to advancing civilization are found. True, our country is extensive and our population expansible; there is ample verge and scope for varied experiments without immediately fatal results; hence these may seem distant dangers. Yes, we have safety-valves against explosions, not elsewhere found. In this respect we differ very materially from the crowded and corrupt population of the old world, where, in cities especially, the ignorant, unemployed and reckless are so pressed and packed together, as to quicken into activity all the foul passions of the human heart. Still, none can deny that some parts of our country, some of our cities especially, are beginning to vie with the very worst of the old world in many of these dangerous peculiarities. Like causes, in like circumstances, will produce like effects. The increasing troubles of the old world will probably increase all these difficulties, in a ratio made up of increased emigration and lessening territory unoccupied. Hitherto the process of annexation or enlargement has put off the evil day. Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico, California and Oregon, will absorb an immense amount of feculent matter. Like Kibroth Hattaavah of old, the graves of the lusters, these may transfer and prolong the experiment of self-government, and neutralize the destructive arts of the deceiver. But, ultimately, the wave of population now dispersed in these almost limitless wastes, will regurgitate and bring back the filth and crime it has carried out, the chosen material of the Destroyer.

Already, among our imported articles, we have the foreign demagogue. There are men among us who have fled to our shores, reeking in the filth of other lands, and reckless of any measures by which their purposes can be accomplished; men practised in the peculiar arts described in the preceding pages, and ready to rejoice in the catastrophe which their arts every where sooner or later produce. Transferring his inveterate and inherited