2

A Change of Remedies.

What would be thought of a physician, who, when called to attend a man desperately sick with some virulent disorder, should adopt a hitherto untried mode of treatment, and persistently refuse to change his remedies, although the patient continued rapidly to grow worse, and was in the most imminent danger of dissolution? The friends of the unfortunate man expostulate with the doctor, urge him to abandon his hazardous experiment, and return to the old orthodox mode of treatment, which has proven successful in former cases; but instead of yielding to their demands, he becomes furiously enraged at their interference, and threatens that, if they do not leave him free to kill the sick man in his insane desire to test the qualities of his favorite medicine, he will murder them also with his scalpel. A physician like this would scarcely stand a chance to be employed again in that family.

Our republic is such a patient; Lincoln its doctor, and the abolition proclamation his pet remedy. Long ago he adopted the idea that such a measure would prove a sovereign panacea for almost every ailment of the body politic, and now that the long sought opportunity to test its virtues has occurred, he is determined to make the most of his position. Undeterred by the frightful progress of the disease, and the rapid prostration of the patient under this experimentum crucis — paying no heed to the warnings of older and far more experienced leeches than himself, he persists in bleeding and blistering the already anaemic individual, and plying him with doses of his poisonous compound. The people demand either the dismissal of this incompetent bungler, or that he shall essentially change his treatment. While he employed the remedies laid down in the books — the constitution and laws — and followed the example of the great lights of the profession, the fathers of our republic, the case progressed prosperously. But he has cast these books aside, dismissed his former advisers, and thrown himself into the arms of quacks for counsel. With a change of treatment, comes a change for the worse. The patient begins to sink, and all signs indicate a speedy disolution. No one can fail to perceive that the course now pursued can result in but one termination — the death of our Union. Abolition experiments will surely destroy it. Will the physician dismiss his quack advisers, return to constitutional treatment, and save the Union before it is too late?