It was precisely this enlightened lesson which those who agreed in the sentiment of clemency, proposed to apply to the condition of the Southern States. It was this party which took its instruction from exalted schools of statesmanship; which looked at the situation from the eminence of History; and which desired to bind up with the Federal authority the rights, peace, and prosperity of all parts of the country.

Obviously the policy of this party, with reference to what was called "Reconstruction," was to consider the Southern States as in the Union, without any ceremonies or conditions other than what might be found in the common Constitution of the country. What may be designated generally as the Conservative party in the North, had long held the doctrine that, as the Union was inviolable and permanent, secession was illegal, revolutionary, null, and void; that it had no legal validity or effect; that it was the act of seditious individuals, and did not affect the status of the States purporting to secede. This branch of their doctrine was accepted by a large number of the Republican party; among them Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State. President Lincoln had acted upon this theory when it became necessary to reorganize States overrun by Federal armies. It was held by the Conservative party, against all rational dispute, that the business of the Federal Government, with respect to the insurgent States, was simply to quell resistance, and to execute everywhere the Constitution and laws. Its contest was not with the States, but with the illegal powers within the States engaged in resisting its authority. When the resistance of these persons ceased, the work was done; and the States were eo instante, ipso facto, as much within the Union as ever; no act of re-admission being necessary. It only remained for the judiciary to proceed by indictment and legal trial, under the forms of law, against the individuals who had resisted the authority of the Union to test the fact of treason, and to vindicate the reputation of the Government. And this was the whole extent to which the policy of penalities could be insisted

upon.

On this opinion there was soon to be a sharp and desperate array of parties at Washington. When, by the tragical death of President Lincoln, in a public theatre, at the hands of one of the most indefensible but courageous assassins that history has ever produced, the Executive office passed to the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, the Southern people ignorantly deplored the change as one to their disadvantage, and the world indulged but small expectations from the coming man. The new President was sprung from a low order of life, and was what Southern gentlemen called a "scrub." In qualities of mind it was generally considered that he had the shallowness and fluency of the demagogue; but in this there was a mistake. At any rate, it must be confessed, Mr. Johnson had no literature and but little education of any sort; in his agrarian

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speeches in the Senate, he quoted "the Lays of Ancient Rome" as "translated by Macaulay;" and he was constantly making those mistakes in historical and literary allusions which never fail to characterize and betray self-educated men. Before his elevation to the Presidency, Mr. Johnson was considered a demagogue, who seldom ventured out of common-places, or attempted anything above the coarse sense of the multitude, successful, industrious, a clod-head, a "man of the people," that peculiar product of American politics. But there are familiar instances in history where characters apparently the most common-place and trifling, have been suddenly awakened and elevated as great responsibilities have been thrust upon them, and have risen to the demands of the new occasion. An example of such change was afforded by plain Andrew Johnson, when he stepped to the dignity of President of a restored Union, with all its great historical trusts for him to administer in sight of the world. From that hour the man changed. The eminence did not confound him; he saw before him a part in American history second only to that of George Washington; he left behind him the ambitions and resentments of mere party; he rose as the man who has been secretly, almost unconsciously, great-a commonplace among his neighbour, the familiar fellow of the company-suddenly, completely to the full height and dignity of the new destiny that called him. The man who had been twitted as a tailor and condemned as a demagogue, proved a statesman, measuring his actions for the future, insensible to clamour and patient for results.

President Johnson belonged to an intermediate school of politics, standing between the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun and those of Alexander Hamilton. He was never an extreme State-Rights man; he had never recognized the right of nullification, or that of secession; but he was always disposed to recognize, in a liberal degree, the rights of the States, and to combat the theory that the Federal Government absorbed powers and privileges, which, from the foundation of the republic, had been conceded to the States.

It was fortunate that the Chief Magistrate of the country, who was to administer its affairs and determine its course on the close of the war, occupied this medium ground in politics-the one that suggested the practicability of compromise, and assured a conservative disposition in a time of violent and critical dispute. It was natural that on the close of hostilities the tide of public opinion should have set strongly in favour of Consolidation; and that men should apply the precedent of powers used in the war, to the condition of peace. The great question which the war had left, was as to the form and spirit of the Government that ensued upon it-in short, the determination of the question whether the experience of the past four years had been a Constitutional Revolution, or the mere decision of certain special and limited questions. This was the great historical issue. The

political controversies which figured in the newspapers were only its incidents; and the questions which agitated Congress all sounded in the great dispute, whether the war had merely accomplished its express and particu lar objects, or given the American people a change of polity, and dated a new era in their Constitutional history.

At the time these pages are committed to the press, a series of measures has already been accomplished or introduced by the Radical party in the Congress at Washington that would accomplish a revolution in the American system of government, the most thorough and violent of modern times. Propositions have been made so to amend the Constitution as to deprive the States of the power to define the qualifications of electors; propositions to regulate representation by the number of voters, and not of population; propositions to declare what obligations assumed by the States shall be binding on them, and what shall be the purposes of their taxation. What is known as the Civil Rights Bill (passed over the President's veto) has not only established negro equality, but has practically abolished, on one subject of jurisdiction at least, State laws and State courts. In short, the extreme Black Republican party at Washington has sought to disfranchise the whole Southern people, to force negro suffrage upon the South, to prevent the South from being represented in Congress so as to perpetuate the power of the Radicals, and afford them the means of governing the Southern States as conquered and subjugated territories.

The practical fault of all Despotism is that it takes too little into account the sentimentalism which opposes it, and attempts to deal with men as inanimate objects, to which the application of a certain amount of force for a desired end is decisive. It never considers feelings and prejudices. It does not understand that in the science of government there are elements to conciliate as well as forces to compel. The Northern radicals look to the dragoon with his sword, the marshal with his process of confiscation, and the negro thrust into a false position as the pacificators of the country and the appropriate sentinels of the South. They never reflect on the results of such measures upon the feelings of the Southern people; they do not estimate the loss in that estrangement which makes unprofitable companions; they do not imagine the resentments they will kindle; they do not calculate the effect of a constant irritation that at last wears into the hearts of a people, and makes them ready for all desperate enter prises.

If on this subject the Northern people are best addressed in the language of their interests, they may be reminded that the policy of the Radicals is to detain and embarrass the South, not only in the restoration of her political rights, but in her return to that material prosperity, in which the North has a partnership interest, and the Government itself its most important financial stake. The Southern people must be relieved from the

apprehension of confiscation, and other kindred measures of oppression, before they can be expected to go to work and improve their condition. They must be disabused of the idea that the new system of labour is to be demoralized by political theories, before giving it their confidence, and enlarging the experiment of it. The troubled sea of politics must be composed before the industry of the South can return to its wonted channels, and reach at last some point of approximation to former prosperity.

The financiers at Washington consider it of the utmost importance that the South should be able to bear its part of the burden of the national debt, and by its products for exchange contribute to the reduction of this debt to a specie basis. The whole edifice of Northern prosperity rests on the unstable foundation of paper credit. Every man in the North is intelligibly interested in the earliest development of the material prosperity of the South. It is not by political agitation that this interest is to be promoted; not under the hand of the Fanaticism that sows the wind that there are to grow up the fruits of industry. When the Southern people obtain political reassurance, and are able to lift the shield of the Constitution over their heads, they will be prepared for the fruitful works of peace; they will be ready then for the large and steady enterprises of industry. All history shows and all reason argues that where a people are threatened with political changes, and live in uncertainty of the future, capital will be timid, enterprise will be content with make-shifts, and labour itself, give but an unsteady hand to the common implements of industry.

He must be blind who does not perceive in the indications of Northern opinion and in the series of legislative measures consequent upon the war the sweeping and alarming tendency to Consolidation. It is not only the territorial unity of the States that is endangered by the fashionable dogma of the day, but the very cause of republican government itself. A war of opinions has ensued upon that of arms, far more dangerous to the American system of liberties than all the ordinances of Secession and all the armed hosts of the Confederates.

The State Rights put in question by the propositions we have referred to in Congress, are not those involved in the issue of Secession, and, therefore, decided against the South by the arbitration of the war. The Radical programme, which we have noted above, points the illustration that the war did not sacrifice the whole body of State Rights, and that there was an important residuum of them outside of the issue of Secession, which the people of the South were still entitled to assert, and to erect as new standards of party. It is precisely those rights of the States which a revoItionary party in Congress would deny, namely: to have their Constitutional representation, to decide their own obligations of debt, to have their own codes of crimes and penalties, and to deal with their own domestic

concerns, that the Southern States claim have survived the war and are not subjects of surrender.

And it is just here that the people of the South challenge that medium doctrine of State Rights professed by President Johnson to make the necessary explanation, and to distribute the results of the war between North and South. They do not look at the propositions in Congress as involving a mere partisan dispute; they are not disposed to encounter them in a narrow circle of disputation, and make a particular question of what is one grand issue. They regard them in the broad and serious sense of a revolution against the Constitution; a rebellion against all the written and traditionary authority of American statesmanship; a war quite as distinct as that of bayonets and more comprehensive in its results than the armed contest that has just closed.

The following remarks of the President of the United States, do not magnify the occasion. They are historical:

"The present is regarded as a most critical juncture in the affairs of the nation, scarcely less so than when an armed and organized force sought to overthrow the Government. To attack and attempt the disruption of the Government by armed combination and military force, is no more dangerous to the life of the nation than an attempt to revolutionize and undermine it by a disregard and destruction of the safeguards thrown around the liberties of the people in the Constitution. My stand has been taken, my course is marked; I shall stand by and defend the Constitution against all who may attack it, from whatever quarter the attack may come. I shall take no step backward in this matter."

An intelligent foreigner, making his observations at Washington at this time, would be puzzled to determine whether the Americans had a Government, or not. There are the names: The Executive, the Congress, the Judiciary; but what is the executive question, what the congressional question, what the judicial queston, it appears impossible to decide. It is a remarkable fact that at Washington to-day, there is not a single well-defined department of political power! There are the paraphernalia and decorations of a government; an elaborate anarchy; but the well-defined distribution of power and the order necessary to administer public affairs appear to have been wholly lost, the charter of the government almost obliterated, and the Constitution overlaid with amendments, which, carried into effect, would hardly leave a vestige of the old instrument or a feature in which could be recognized the work of our forefathers, and the ancient creation of 1789. The controversy thus engendered is something more than a mere question of parties where there are points of coincidence between the contestants sufficient to confine opposition, and where both argue from the common premises of a written constitution. It is something more than the temporary rack and excitement of those partisan