and especially of a Presidential election. The salaries, the official fees and perquisites, the lucrative contracts, the day wages of thousands and thousands of men, are put at hazard, to be gained by one party and lost by the other. In such a case, if money can do anything, the money will not be wanting. Cannot a party in power always raise money for all party purposes by an assessment upon office-holders, in proportion to the value of their offices? Is not that method of raising money an established system? Are not lucrative of fices often given to hungry aspirants with the express condition that a certain portion of the emoluments shall be paid over for the use and benefit of the party? Is it not well understood that the office-holder who refuses to pay his assessment, loses his place? Such a system, most obviously, tends to place at the disposal of party managers indefinite and unknown amounts of money, which can hardly fail to be employed in procuring, directly or indirectly, by one method or another, the perpetration of the great crime against the right of suffrage. And, what is even more detestable, such a system, perseveringly kept up, is sure to establish, if not in the higher places of trust and emolument, at least in a thousand petty places of dependence on Custom Houses and the Post Office Department, and in those inferior offices of which the government of a large city is so full, men of the lowest order of morals-men whose habits and associations enable them, in spite of all ordinary vigilance, and especially under a conniving or careless superintendence of elections, to overflow the ballot boxes, if they will, with votes which have no right to be there.

Coördinate with all this, and naturally connected with it, is another practice which is sufficient of itself to put any amount of money for criminal uses, into the hands of the vilest tools of party. We mean the immoral and every way mischievous practice of betting on the result of an election. There is an intrinsic immorality in such wagers. The transaction is not of the nature of insurance, but purely of the nature of gambling. All the principles which evince the intrinsic immorality of betting on a horse race, on a cock fight,

[May, on the throwing of dice, on any game of chance or skill, evince the immorality of betting on the result of an election. But this is not all. Every man who makes a wager on the result of a pending election, puts two persons at least--himself and the other party in the transaction-under a strong temptation. to use, directly or indirectly, corrupt and fraudulent means of influencing the result. Whatever honor there may be among thieves, there is none among gamblers, save that which pays "debts of honor" at the expense of honesty; and he is fit only to be plucked, who believes that a gambler will not cheat him if he can. The man whose moral principles are so infirm that he has yielded to temptation, and has hazarded his money on such a chance as this, will of course be tempted-and the probability is that he will be effectually tempted-to yield his connivance, at least, to measures and proceedings against which he would otherwise have protested with honest indignation.

No honest man, who is tempted to show his confidence in the success of his party, by the offer or acceptance of a wager, should permit himself to forget, for one moment, how directly, and with what force of motive power, this widely tolerated practice operates to promote and procure the crime against the right of suffrage. If you offer any man a wager on a pending election or what is the same thing, if you accept his offer of a wager-what is that you promise him? What is the nature of your contract with him? You have said to him, in effect, just this: "Sir, there is a certain sum of money deposited in safe hands; if your party will manage to get votes enough into the ballot-boxes to carry your candidate into of fice over the candidate of my party, the money shall be yours." The man with whom you have made such a contract is not likely to be overscrupulous in the use of means. He can af ford to occupy his time-he can afford, if the wager is large, to hire other men who shall employ their time and their welltried skill in all the low and villainous arts by which the people are defrauded of their right to choose their own servants. And if the practiced criminals who infest great cities, and who, having made political knavery their speciality, know

how to crowd false votes into the ballot-boxes in spite of every precaution as practised burglars know how to carry on their trade in spite of improved locks and the metropolitan police-can find men enough to promise them money in this way; they have a fund at their command, with which they can accomplish anything. Thus a party without one honest chance of success may sometimes be carried into power by the funds which the unprincipled, heedless, gambling avarice of its adversaries has placed at its disposal.

We have taken it upon ourselves, in this Article, to hold up before the public one great political danger of our country-a danger growing every year more formidable-a danger for which, as we have intimated, no one party is alone responsible. The danger is, that the ever increasing facilities, and ever multiplying instruments for the perpetration of the great crime against the right of suffrage, will be used more and more, on all sides, in times of high political excitement, and soon, perhaps, at every return of a popular election; and that thus the public sentiment in regard to the atrocity of the crime will be more and more demoralized, and the public confidence in what purports to be the expression of the people's will, and in all the working of our republican institutions, will be more and more impaired, till the nation shall perish in its own corruption.

The trust which God has committed to the free citizens of these states, is such as was never before committed to any people. As we think of that great trust, and of the great interests of humanity, throughout the world and through all coming ages, which are dependent on the fidelity with which that trust is kept;-as we remember how manifestly and rapidly, according to the testimony and the mutual crimination of all parties, this crime against the right of suffrage, this foulest and most loathsome form of treason against the very principle of popular self-government, is permitted to increase ;as we see how little sense there seems to be of the extreme baseness of all collusion with such a crime;--as we see how the conviction seems to spread that frauds of this kind are an inevitable incident, if not a necessary element in political

affairs; we cannot but ask ourselves, Will not God be avenged for such an abuse of such a trust? Will not the displeasure of God manifest itself against a people so trusted, who permit so great a trust to be taken from them, not by violence which they cannot resist, but by demoralizing influences which they might suppress and eradicate, but which, in their folly, they neglect? Such a people need only be left to themselves, and how speedily will they work out their own signal punishment! Children will be their princes-no, not children but men far more unfit than children to bear the symbols of authority; men known as criminals, and guilty of the grossest frauds in private as well as in public affairs, will rule over them; and they will be "oppressed every one by another, and every one by his neighbor."

ARTICLE X.-REPLY TO THE METHODIST QUARTERLY
REVIEW.

WE find in the Methodist Quarterly Review, for January last, some editorial strictures upon our discussion of Dr. Taylor's work on Moral Government, which call for a brief reply.

Our readers will remember that in that Article, after exhibiting the somewhat extreme views of several of the New England divines upon the reason for the Divine permission of evil, we observed that the principle from which their inconsistencies flowed, is by no means peculiar to themselves; and that we referred briefly to both Catholic and Arminian writers, as having shared in the same erroneous scheme. In particular, we quoted the language of Wesley, as showing that "the same views which Edwards maintained of the increased blessedness derived from the introduction of sin, Wesley himself expressed about the results of the fall." For this statement we are taken to task; and charged with "misrepresenting" something-it does not appear, very exactly, what. As we made no comment, and placed no construction. upon the language which we quoted, and as the correctness of the quotation is not questioned, we are somewhat at a loss to know in what the alleged misrepresentation consists.

The editor of that Journal proceeds to declare that the passage in question "affirms only what everybody holds to be true, that in our remedial system a particular evil has been overruled by God, so as to eventuate in a higher good to our race, all the thanks being due to God, and none to the evil." What is meant by the phrase "a higher good" in this language of our critic, as compared with that which is not a good at all but only "a particular evil," is not very clear; but the vague and unmeaning language of the critic falls far below the simple and definite utterance of Wesley, for which it is substituted. The great founder of Methodism generally