Excerpt from The Conduct of the Administration Reprinted From the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot

We have said that there is nothing in the history of the world at all parallel to this singular and imposing scene. There have been, no doubt, and still are, other communities organized on the principle of an elective chief magistracy. Such was the case with the great Republics of Rome and Carthage, with most of the democracies of ancient Greece and modern Italy, with Switzer land and Holland, and at one period with the unfortunate King dom of Poland. But in all these countries the state of the community and the form under which the elective principle was ap plied, were so totally different that it is impossible for us to turn them to any practical account as precedents the case is entirely new.

No precise parallel to it can be found, even in the preceding elections ofthe same kind, that have taken place among ourselves. The state of the country changes so rapidly that in the short space of four years new forces are introduced into our political machinery of which it is impossible to calculate beforehand the operation or the effects. At the first election we had only thir teen States we have now four and twenty. - When Mr. Jeffer son was chosen President we had less that six million inhabitants; we, have now by the census more than twelve, and in reality more than thirteen. At all the earlier elections our largest cities did not contain more than twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants; they now contain more than two hundred thousand, and have begun to assume in consequence a different physiognomy, and to exercise a different action on community. Before the year 1800, the West was a vast wilderness; it now holds the balance of political power among the States, and expects at no distant day to sway the sceptre. Since the last election it has received from the new census a considerable augmentation of strength. These changes and various others hardly less important, to which we cannot even allude, have materially varied the political as pect of the country from one election to another, and will con tinne to render them all, as they successfully occur, operations of a new impression, involving elements that have never been in action before, and of which the nature and effects can of course be foreseen with very little certainty.

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