STEAMBOAT ELECTIONS.

The National Intelligencer is doing wonders from day to day in making Mr. Clay President in virtue of steamboat elections. Yesterday, Mr. Clay carried it all hollow in the cabin, probably, of one of these floating gambling establishments that ply up down the great western waters. And today again we have the following item:

“An election for President was held on board the Goddess; and, at the close of the poll, there was—for Clay, 67 votes; for Polk, 26 votes. Even this cannot be regarded as a fair index of popular opinion, because of the accumulation of locofoco delegates on board the boat; but the same relative majority will be maintained all over the Union. From another quarter—the Mary Tompkins, on the Missouri—we have this vote: Clay, 32; Polk, 8.”

It may be freely admitted that, if the foaming gentlemen who live upon the highways, and who are constantly plying between the great cities of our country in the steamboat taverns, are to decide the fate of the presidency, there is but little hope of the election of a candidate who belongs to the democracy [Democratic Party] of the nation. The democratic principle flourishes in the bosom of our teeming farms and busy workshops. The tenants of these honest homesteads are as seldom to be found puffing away life’s busy season upon our rivers, on steamboat lounges, as upon tavern stoops ashore. It is true that the active, hard-working, business man may be here and there counted among a steamboat company, and, when called out, will generally proclaim himself a democrat. But the mass of these itinerants is ever made up of gentlemen of leisure, throwing off the tedium of an idle life by change of place and motion by steam, being too lazy to move themselves—of prowling Blacklegs, thus thursting upon the unsuspecting, (whom they could not meet elsewhere,) to play off their tricks upon travellers—of Yankee pedlers, carrying their tariff-protected wares around the country to get two prices in virtue of Mr. Clay’s prohibitory laws—and of that riff-raff generally, that run up and down in the pursuit of a livelihood to be gained by their wits instead of their work. That Mr. Clay should outvote the democratic candidate in a society made up of such materials, is evident enough. He is the patron of all such knights of industry. His paper-money projects; his stockjobbing, debt-creating, distributing, speculating, gambling policy suits exactly the fugitive tribes ever on our roads and rivers. These are the very men most likely to avail themselves advantageously of the ups and downs in the currency and in the prices of property, and of all the chances which belong to an unsettled state of things throughout a wide country. A steady standard of value, a regular system of business, fixed prices of labor and of products, afford no opportunities for the better information of the gadabouts to cheat the people of their earnings. Hence they are not Polk men, but Clay men; and go for the gambling instead of the plain-dealing man.

But the editor of the National Intelligencer has good reason to make a vaunt of the votes of these steamboat fraternities. They count a vast deal more than their numerical force in a presidential election. Mr. Clay’s majority in the Senate, by refusing to pass the bill from the House providing that the presidential election should be held on the same day in every State, proves that whigery knows how to value the ambulatory steamboating power. The steamboat communities live all along shore, and vote all along shore; and in the course of the next November, it is not improbable that every steam-power vote will be worth ten votes in every State on the western waters. Nay, it was established by incontestable proof, before the Ohio legislature, that the steamboats imported hundreds of votes from Louisville and other towns in Kentucky, to vote at Cincinnati and other places in Ohio, to swell Harrison’s poll in 1840. And to aid in this fra[u]d, Mr. Clay’s friends in the Kentucky legislature changed the day for the election in Kentucky, which fell on the same day with that in Ohio, so that the Kentuckians, after having been drawn together to vote at the polls in their own State, might then be immediately transported, without loss of time, to different places in Ohio, to carry the elections for the coons in that State. From this practical illustration, and the daily tests heralded in the Intelligencer, it will be seen that Mr. Clay’s friends have great reason to rejoice in the support anticipated from the whig invention of pipe-laying by steam power.