THE character of an Administration may often be seen in the kind of persons chiefly employed by it, and the sort of treatment such persons receive at its hands. If it be mean-spirited, low, and vulgar, in its sentiments, designs, and policy, and wanting in all generous feelings and aspirations, the agents it employs will generally be found to have an original touch of its own quality, and the highest honor will attend them. Or if, by accident, or the pressure of some inexorable necessity, men of high character are called into its service, they will commonly be subjected to all sorts of tricks, intrigues, and annoyances, while in place, and rewarded in the end for the most meritorious deeds by as much obloquy as envy and malice can heap on them. The general truth here announced finds a significant example and illustration, in the administration of Mr. Polk. Men without talent and without character have had the confidence of the President, and been advanced to stations of the highest dignity and importance; whilst other men, endowed with every quality which can exalt and dignify human nature, casually in the service of the Government, have failed to secure his confidence or to meet with even common justice at his hands. In diplomacy, he intrusts a most delicate and

difficult mission to Mr. Nicholas P. Trist, a clerk in the State Department, who had never shown any fitness for any public employment requiring either capacity or character. And in the field, his favorite General and confidant is Pillow, who is utterly destitute of military talent or information, and who is proved to have been guilty of acts which must forever exclude him from the society of gentlemen. The President makes this man a Major-general, and does not dare to submit the appointment to his constitutional advisers, the Senate, though composed of a large majority of his own political friends. On the other hand, Taylor and Scott, in office in spite of the President, men of the highest professional talent, and of the highest character, each in his own sphere, have found it impossible to command the confidence of the Administration, or even its just support. Both have had to complain, first of its neglect, and finally of its enmity-an enmity which has rankled towards them respectively just in proportion to their real merits and their glorious services. General Taylor, to whose native dignity of character it does not belong to use the language of complaint, except for the gravest causes, has this significant closing paragraph forced from him in his