administration, what are two hundred millions likely to cause hereafter? Such a prize will not render the elections more orderly or the councils of nominating conventions more pure. We are likely to have "military heroes" as aspirants for the Presidency, and large armies either in the field or recently disbanded; and these facts do not diminish the perils of the future. The past performances of nominating conventions have not inspired the people with much respect, and it is doubtful if they can be safely trusted hereafter. Unless in some way the Executive power can be modified, there is reason to fear that it may destroy the Government. It would be wiser to change it, by taking thought beforehand, than to have it changed by convulsive events.

If we could be taught by present bitter experience a more discreet use of the elective franchise, the present system could be made to work well, as indeed any system will work well, directed by an intelligent and virtuous people. Nominating conventions might be made useful and safe representatives of opinion, if the people would determine that they should be such. They have in them germs and possibilities of good, and even now are not wholly evil. Why cannot they be regulated by law, and their mischievous tendencies restrained? They have become an institution of formidable power, and should therefore be made amenable to legal authority. Perhaps this war may settle one essential principle, that the decision of the ballot-box must be submitted to. Perhaps public opinion, instructed by past enormities, may be able to control the gross abuse of Executive patronage, and require the nomination, by parties, of men of ability and good character,—not of demagogues. But let us avoid rash and sudden changes. Let us keep what we can of the work of the Convention, and bring it back as near as we can to what they intended. Should experience show that their work is unable to satisfy our new wants, let us alter it with reverential deliberation and care, and only where alteration is necessary and when it is necessary.

Should our Union be restored, and this country become what we hope and intend to make it,-a great Empire of republican

liberty, some changes in the organic law of the Government may be required. If civilization means anything,—if science and literature, schools and a free press, and representative institutions have any virtue, these changes will be made by thought, and not by force. The necessity will invoke American ingenuity to invent an Executive machine that will supply the American demand for order, liberty, and national safety, just as the size of the cotton crop created the cotton gin, our immense grain-fields the reaper, our vast expanses of territory the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph, and the exigencies of the present war the Monitor and Merrimac, which are destined to work as great marvels in naval warfare as the former have done in commerce and the arts. Liberty, order, security and national power we must have. Our Saxon nature demands them all, and demands them all without Royalty or regal splendor, hereditary rank or a privileged class. The English have contrived gradually to convert a feudal monarchy into a monarchical republic, and instead of a haughty Henry VIII or imperious Elizabeth, live now under the mild sway of an amiable and domestic Victoria, dressed in crinoline, and a good-natured and harmless Palmerston, decorated with red tape. In like manner, the genius of our kindred race, stimulated by the needs of time, will surely be able so to mould and modify the instrument of Executive power fashioned for us by our fathers, that it may become strong enough for our safety, yet not too strong for our liberty; serviceable for the public good,—not pliable, to serve private ends; republican, without the license of democracy; steadfast, but not immovable; and, whilst responsive to the sober thought and advancing spirit of the age, firm to resist Utopian schemes of change and the reckless passions of revolution.

CHAPTER IV.

SLAVERY.

ANOTHER novelty put by force of inexorable circumstances into our Constitution was slavery, and not slavery only, but the African slave trade. The latter was protected for twenty years, the former forever; and to render it secure was interwoven with the most important functions of government, with representation and taxation. When the Constitution was formed, slavery existed in nearly all the States; but it was a plant not suited to a Northern climate, and therefore it did not flourish in the North. It did suit the South, because the climate suited the negro. He grew there with prolific luxuriance, as he did in his native Africa. The hot sun of the South, which invigorated the black race, weakened the white, indisposed it to labor, made it willing to be labored for and served. Having the intellectual superiority and force of character, and thence the power, the white man made the black his servant. Out of the toil of the negro, grew the wealth of the South, and out of his natural, and therefore permanent, inferiority to the white man, coupled with his docility, grew up the structure of Southern society. The material prosperity of the South, its manners, habits, institutions and essential conditions and characteristics, were thus, then as now, founded on slavery and the negro, and on slavery because of the negro. A government, therefore, for the Union that did not give some sanction and protection to slavery was impossible. On no other terms would all of the Southern States have entered the Union. They were not content even with slavery, but, wanting more negroes for their extensive tracts of fertility, stipulated for the privilege of importing slaves from Africa for a limited period. They would not be refused, and could

not without giving up the Union, so important to the safety and interest of both North and South, and the hopes so dear to both of founding a great nation. The terms of the South were granted, but with much reluctance. It was difficult for the leading minds of the Convention to accept slavery as part and parcel of a Constitution intended to establish freedom, or to blot and blemish it with a thing so odious as the slave trade, then beginning to attract the indignant notice of advancing civilization.

The slave trade regarded negroes as merchandise, and so did the laws of the South; but the former, besides its attendant barbarities, converted freemen into slaves, whilst the latter merely prevented slaves from becoming freemen. Humanity and the North gained a qualified triumph by the clause in the Constitution providing, by implication, that the Government may (not shall) prohibit the importation of slaves after the year 1808. Slavery was accepted per force, yet what could be done was done to deprive it of its most repulsive feature, and to clothe its ugly nakedness in the decent robes of humanity and justice. Slaves were called "persons" in the Constitution wherever alluded to, and this word, both in its technical and popular meaning, is used in opposition to things and excludes the idea of property. The Convention did not mean expressly to exclude that idea, for slaves, even as property, are persons held to service, but they used language applicable to them both as property and as men, but more peculiarly and properly applicable to the relation of master and servant for life, which is a very different thing in its moral aspect and legal consequences, in its influences and its results, from the relation of owner and thing owned, which is the principle of the slave trade and of Southern laws.

With difficulty did our fathers yield to expediency and bring themselves to deface the fair Constitution they were writing, by provisions to protect and perpetuate human bondage. Their repugnance is shown by the words they employed. Nowhere is slavery mentioned, or property in slaves or the negro race. A stranger to the history of the Constitution could never gather from any of its phrases that either of these

were referred to or had existence in the country. In the clause establishing the ratio of taxation and representation, after an enumeration of different classes, slaves are spoken of as "all other persons." In the section forbidding the prohibition of the slave trade before 1808, the slave hunt in Africa, the warfare of savage tribes to supply the market, the horrors of the middle passage and the revolting scenes of the slave auction, are all decently draped in these words: "The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit." The provision for the return of fugitive slaves, describes the slave as a "person held to service or labor," and his master as "the party to whom such service or labor may be due." No one could tell from the Constitution itself that the word person, in either of these cases, meant negroes or slaves, except, perhaps, in the first, where persons "bound to service" for life are implied. The fugitive slave clause applies as well to apprentices, and under it possession of apprentices has been and may be recovered.

These ambiguous phrases were not used without a motive. They express the truth, then dawning on this subject, that as by the laws of nature there can be no such thing as property in man, so neither can there be by human laws. That the relation of master and slave is the relation of a man to a man, not of a man to a thing, and therefore imposes on the master duties and confers on the slave rights which, though he be a negro, a white man is bound to respect.

All the provisions in the Constitution in favor of slavery and the slave trade, were inserted to secure the adhesion of South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia to the Union, and this reason was expressly stated in the debates of the Convention. Aversion to slavery was openly avowed, and though it was thought better to admit it than to exclude those States, Mr. Sherman and Mr. Madison declared it was wrong to use any language in the Constitution which implied that there "could be property in men." Most of their eminent contemporaries disapproved of slavery, lamented its existence, and looked forward hopefully to the day when it would disappear.