Time & Perspective Quote by Caleb Cushing

Cushing opens like a man clearing his throat on purpose. The sentence is a legalistic runway: “allusion has been made,” “in an early stage,” “to the history of the excitement,” each clause pushing the heat of the topic one step farther away from the speaker’s hands. That’s the intent. Before he touches Sunday mail and the “Lord’s day,” he reframes it as procedural memory, not moral emergency. In a debate where Sabbatarian outrage could easily hijack the room, he tries to convert passion into paperwork.

The subtext is a soft rebuke to the theatrics of public agitation. “Excitement” is doing heavy work: not principled conviction, not righteous concern, but a kind of civic fever that “once pervaded” and, importantly, belongs to the past. He’s shrinking the movement by historicizing it, implying it was a flare-up rather than a durable mandate. Even “considerable part of the country” is calibrated: large enough to acknowledge, vague enough to deny it the dignity of “the people.”

Context matters. Early 19th-century fights over Sabbath observance weren’t just church talk; they were battles over federal authority, commerce, and whose morals get baked into policy. Mail delivery on Sundays symbolized a government that runs on modern time, not sacred time. As a diplomat and seasoned Washington operator, Cushing speaks in the idiom of institutions: he doesn’t attack religion head-on, he sidesteps it by treating the controversy as a case study in overheated public sentiment. The line is a preemptive de-escalation tactic, and a quiet assertion that governance shouldn’t be governed by revival-style surges.