The grand conspiracy might fail after all; for the right of the Vice-President to count the vote and declare the result had been denied by nearly all the leading men of the country, of whatever party. Indeed, according to an unbroken chain of precedents beginning with the election of Washington, and reaching down to the year 1876, the counting of the electoral vote is rightfully done by Congress, or under its authority and direction; while the right of the Vice-President to count or canvass it has never been claimed by any presiding officer of the Senate, at any time or under any circumstances. The twenty-second joint rule, adopted in 1865 by a Republican Congress, was an express recog nition of the right of the two Houses of Congress to determine the question. To this rule and the principle it recognized nearly all the leading Republicans in the Senate stood committed, and their decided opinions on the subject had been recorded in its debates within the preceding ten or twelve months. What was to be done? How could the Democrats be kept out of power, and the reign of Republicanism be prolonged, if these precedents were to be considered as binding? The difficulty was not insurmountable. "Where there is a will there is a way," and the case was a plain one in the eyes of the leaders, who regarded a new lease of Republican power as a foreordained necessity, and had never faltered in their pursuit of it since they had been summoned to their task by the telegram of William E. Chandler. The Republican party was stretched on its bed of death, and gasping out its prayer for deliverance from the judgment to come; and if any nostrums would save it they must be administered. The inauguration of Hayes and Wheeler was a foregone conclusion, and, as this could only be done through the canvass and count of the electoral vote by the Vice-President, precedents must be disregarded, and that officer must face the duty. Accordingly, Senator Morton, always ready to sacrifice either principle or consistency in the service of his party, announced that the President of the Senate would count the electoral vote and declare the result, and that, if necessary, it would be enforced by the army and navy. A decided majority of his party friends were ready to join him in this somersault, and the Vice-President avowed his readiness to play his part; while the President, who, as we have said, believed the vote of Louisiana should not be

counted, proceeded to mass his troops in the capital. Whether this revolutionary conspiracy would have been attempted, if the Democrats had been ready to stand by their constitutional rights, can never be certainly known; but the spirit and aim of the Republican leaders were perfectly developed, and worked out the desired result.

A single further illustration of the dominating idea and ruling passion of the Republican party remains to be noticed. The electoral commission, which was agreed to under the apprehension of civil war, contained a Republican majority of eight to seven. That that majority, itself the product of the party and representative of its ideas and policy, would suddenly call a halt in the march of events through which forty millions of people were to be deprived of the right to choose their chief functionaries was not to be believed for a moment by any man who would soberly ponder the question. That the Democratic leaders and masses were so ready to confide in the honor and patriotism of a commission so constituted seemed to us then, as it does to-day, a matter of profound amazement. The crime of the commission, it is true, was perfectly matchless and continental in its proportions, and it was followed by the trover and conversion of the very principles on which the battle for Tilden and Hendricks had been fought. But it was not an eccentric fact, suddenly making its apparition in our politics, in defiance of the law of cause and effect. It was the child of the foul ancestry which could not fail to give it birth. It was simply the leaf and flower of long years of political corruption and prosperous guilt. It was the achievement of trained mercenaries, who had so mastered the whole gamut of knavery and fraud that their marvelous skill naturally culminated in the theft of the presidency. This is the naked truth in its last analysis. The Republican judges and politicians on the commission simply acted after their kind. They were, themselves, parts of a long-used political machinery which had allowed no obstacles to stand in its path. We believe they felt their own helplessness as keenly as they deplored the ugly work it imposed. They must have been aware of the dishonesty and corruption of the Returning Board of Louisiana. They knew, of course, that Tilden and Hendricks had carried the State by not far from eight thousand majority. They knew that there was no pretext whatVOL. CXXVI.-NO. 261.

19

ever on which that majority could be destroyed, except that of intimidation, and that the board totally disregarded those provisions of the State law, a compliance with which alone could give it any jurisdiction whatever over the question, or any authority except to count the votes cast. They knew that their refusal to look into the merits of the controversy was based upon technical grounds alone, and that, without going behind the returns at all, but only to the returns, it was perfectly competent for them to execute the known will of the nation. But they were Republicans, and had long breathed the unwholesome atmosphere of their party. They were thoroughly imbued with its spirit and traditions. They were working for their employers, and could not be expected to rid themselves of the feeling of party obligation, when the party itself was on trial for its life. Like other Republicans, they regarded the triumph of the Democrats as a national calamity, and esteemed the continuance of Republican rule as an impelling desideratum, and they sought their justification in the same reasoning which the party leaders had so long employed to cover up their misdeeds and justify the continued existence of their organization.

Such are the lengths to which the Republican party has been driven by its long-indulged greed of power and the spoils, and the devilish infatuation that its good behavior during the war could justify its career of lawlessness and crime. But its final card has been played. The cup of its transgressions is full, and its hoarded iniquities have at last brought it to judgment. The President of the United States is the incumbent of an office to which he was never elected, and was finally counted in upon the pledge of his most intimate and trusted friends that he would turn his back upon the very issue on which he had been supported in the canvass. While vainly striving to wipe out "the damnèd spot" in the record of his title, the villains of the Louisiana Returning Board, by whose crimes he mounted into power, are in the clutches of the law; and the Republican statesmen who abetted the foul plot by their presence and moral support are evidently troubled by a "fearful looking for of judgment to come." He has mortally offended the great leaders who directed and inspired his canvass, whom he is now striving to hold at bay, and has shamefully mocked the demand of the better element of his

In view of the

party for the reform of administrative abuses. well-drilled cohorts of corruption which confront him, the thorough reform of our civil service would be an exceedingly difficult problem if he were a man of iron will, perfect courage, and absolute devotion to his task. Even then it might not be possible without a popular uprising akin to that which drove the Tammany thieves from their strongholds. It certainly cannot be hoped for through a weak, irresolute Executive, holding his office by fraud, anxious to conciliate the men who deserve no quarter, and afraid to look the situation bravely in the face. This has been demonstrated already by facts, which deserve a passing notice. Mr. Filley, a politician and intriguer of very bad repute, is reappointed postmaster at St. Louis. Mr. Stoughton has been made minister to Russia, as a reward, undoubtedly, for his services in carrying Louisiana for the President in defiance of "clerical errors."

The two chief criminals of the Louisiana Returning Board have at all times had free access to the White House as trusted friends, and are yet holding their important positions in the New Orleans Custom-House, while imprisoned as criminals, just as if Grant were still President. Babcock continues to bask in the sunshine of Executive approval. The removal of Mr. Arthur from the custom-house in New York, after great and inexcusable delay, was accompanied by the offer to him of the Paris consulate, being an evident manœuvre of the President to keep on both sides of the civil-service question. Mr. Simmons still holds his position in Boston; while Mr. Cornell is allowed to retain his surveyorship in New York, after his open defiance of the President's order. The former tools of the Union Pacific Railroad have been reappointed Government directors of that company. The President treats the office of consul-general at Frankfort-onthe-Main as a personal perquisite, by bestowing it upon his private secretary. The offer of the English mission to the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress was a palpable disregard of civilservice reform, as the President himself has defined it, and so was the offer of the German mission to the delegation from Illinois, and the nomination of Mr. Sanford as minister to Belgium. He allows his First-Assistant Postmaster-General to send out blanks through the mails to members of Congress, to be filled by them with the names of such persons as they may see fit to

recommend for office. Many of his appointments, like those of his predecessor, are bestowed as rewards for political services, while the public is left to believe that he is still dispensing his patronage for the purpose of breaking up the Democratic party. Some of the newspapers which have been foremost in his defense now declare that in the matter of reform he has been as unstable as water, and that, like the fabled frog in the well, he jumps three feet forward and falls back four. A man of his mingled obstinacy and irresolution, and so liberally dowered with feebleness, may aggravate existing political troubles, but cannot remove them. Should he surrender himself entirely to the old managers, he will be more irretrievably disgraced than he is already. Should he continue his game of fast and loose, he will fare no better. Should he now abandon his temporizing policy and inaugurate the fight against roguery which has been so criminally delayed, he will fail through the lack of that earnest, well-drilled, and united opinion in his own party which any President must have in a trying situation, and which results chiefly from the belief in his treachery on the Southern question. In any event the party itself is doomed. It lies wallowing in the mire of its apostacy, the helpless victim of its leaders and the spectacle of the nation. Its race is run, and our task fitly ends with its death-struggle. The men who have led it into dishonor and shame will take their place along with the recreant leaders of the past, whose political graves are eloquent with warnings against their example; while the honest but misguided men in its ranks, profiting by their mistakes, will find other tasks awaiting them in the political reconstruction which draws nigh. GEORGE W. JULIAN.