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the exercise of an inestimable privilege and the performance of a high and sacred duty. Mutual explanation of votes is the only means by which mutual confidence can be preserved among citizens, while it saves suffrage itself from profanation, intrigue, and corruption. In an experience of eighty years under the Constitution which makes us a nation, we have renewed the Republic, in the same prescribed way, by twenty national elections. I have voted and explained in the last eleven; these being all of those national elections that have occurred since I came to the franchise. The present election is the twenty-first of the entire series, and my twelfth one. In this election, just as I expressed myself at the time of each preceding one, I feel that this one may be my last.

Every Presidential election necessarily has a real, although an abstract importance. We have here a republican system instead of the monarchical one. An ultimate adoption of this system by all the American nations is necessary for our security. Every new republic established anywhere constitutes a new bulwark of the Republic of the United States.

Our republican government has some peculiar devices of local adaptation and equivalent, designed to operate by way of check and balance. Nevertheless, our Constitution has four essential elements, perhaps no more. These elements are, first, the actual choice of the presiding magistrate by the direct vote of the whole people; second, equal suffrage of all citizens in that election; third, equal representation of all constituent communities in the Republic; and, fourth, conditions and periods of power well defined and absolutely fixed. The casting or the withholding of a vote by any citizen inconsiderately actually impairs, although perhaps imperceptibly, the vigor and energy necessary to the continuance of the Republic, just as the casting or the withholding of all the votes of the people inconsiderately would bring it abruptly to an end.

Standing as we do now at the close of the twentieth administration, I can well conceive that the first election was the most important of all, inasmuch as a mistake then committed in the choice of the first President of the United States, or of the first Congress, might have involved the failure of the system at the very beginning. It was just such a mistake that the French people committed in 1848, when they lost their new republic by electing a Bonaparte instead of a Cavaignac. That mistake having been avoided here, the

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government promptly went into successful operation. acquired vigor by custom, and continually gained strength from increasing popular reverence and affection. The nation encountered no crisis until 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, occurred at a time when a sectional faction, with extensive ramifications, had prepared a formidable rebellion.

The election in 1864 was still more critical. Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected in 1860, had been effectually excluded by the rebellion from recognition or acceptance in one third of the states. It only remained for the still adhering states to reject Lincoln, as President, in 1864, to effect a speedy, if not an immediate, dissolution of the Union. On the other hand, it was reasonably expected that the reaffirmation in 1864 of the choice made in 1860 would so consolidate the loyal and patriotic hopes of the country in support of the administration, as to enable President Lincoln to prosecute the war as no other President could, and to improve returning peace as no other President could, by combining conciliation with decision, until the Constitution should be reëstablished throughout the whole Union. Within four months after the election of 1864 the strength of the rebellion was effectually broken, and on the 4th of March, 1865, Abraham Lincoln entered upon his second term of the Presidency, for the first time with full possession of the rebel states; de facto as well as de jure the recognized and accepted Chief Magistrate of the whole Republic. With him the Congress and the other departments of the Federal Union were equally recognized and accepted.

The duty which devolved upon the government in the second administration of Abraham Lincoln was to save the Constitution and the Union from further revolutionary violence, and by just, generous, and judicious measures to bring the distracted and desolated rebel states back to their constitutional relations with the Federal Union.

We have reached at last the end of that second administration, begun by Abraham Lincoln, and we unfortunately find that its great work, as I have described it, remains as yet only incompletely and unsatisfactorily accomplished. Parties now vehemently dispute whether this failure is the fault of one department or of another; the fault of the President, or the fault of Congress; the fault of the executive system of reconciliation, or of the congressional system of

reconstruction. I do not enter into that dispute. It already belongs to the past. Nevertheless, I am now inclined to think that it was unreasonable to expect the passions and ambitions of thirtythree free states, and thirty millions of free people so recently and terribly convulsed by civil war, to subside in so short a period as four years. It is the highest attribute of the Almighty, which the divine poet has conceived, that He "stilleth the noise of the seas, and the noise of their waves, and the tumult of the people." The storms must be withheld before the seas can come to rest.

Probably such an intense and pervading political agitation as ours could not have been suddenly repressed without overthrowing public liberty itself, as the Napoleons did at the close of two popular French revolutions.

The choice of our two principal magistrates in 1864 was certainly wisely made. We found out at the beginning of the civil war that neither party, and no party alone without coöperation from the other, could save the country. The people who made the choice in 1864 were neither a republican party nor a democratic party, but avowedly and heroically a Union people, and union always means an effective combination of kindred forces. The Union people in 1864 followed the rule which has so generally prevailed of dividing the names to be placed on the Presidential ticket between competing sections, parties, or interests, giving the greater weight to the larger section or party. With nice judgment, therefore, they chose Abraham Lincoln, a northern Union patriot of republican antecedents to be President, and Andrew Johnson, a southern Union patriot of democratic antecedents, to be Vice President.

Active hostilities, however, had hardly ended before there appeared a portentous conflict of popular ideas and opinions concerning the proper conditions of peace and reconciliation, and these ideas and opinions had relation to the so-called reconstruction of Personal ambitions, of the state governments in the rebel states.

course, entered into the controversy. Social ideas and popular ambitions are inherent in all republics, and revolutions stimulate their rapid development. No one form of political idea, no one form of personal ambition that has presented itself in our recent distractions was new. They all sprang up and in turn attained complete, though many of them only temporary, ascendency during the French revolution of 1789, a revolution which, as we all see, gave

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way after a short while to a military despotism that still survives. We now see that in the insurrection the rebel states became revolutionary states, not merely revolutionary against the United States, but revolutionary within themselves. As such, they have experienced the fortune of all revolutionary states. Each new political idea, and every distinct personal ambition in revolutionary states, demands either a severe constitutional reform, or a change of the existing constitution altogether. The right of the people and their power in such states to make such changes is not only unchallenged, but is also unchecked. It follows, as a consequence, that no constitution which is forged in the white-heat of revolution ever endures.

We have forgotten that this nation went through the Revolutionary crisis practically without any constitution at all. There was indeed a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and from all other nations, and a precious assertion of human rights; but no constitutional government was established or framed until seven years after the last belligerent had disappeared from the field. We can all recollect that brilliant constitutions successively came out like fire-beacons in the murky gloom of the French Revolution. All those constitutions were based upon some sound political ideas, and all ought to have been compatible with any patriotic ambition. Yet they succeeded each other so rapidly, that when a politician entered the store of a bookseller in Paris, and asked for the constitution of France, he was answered, "We do not deal here in periodical publications."

Mexico seems at last to have acquired a constitution, but only after forty years of civil wars, culminating in the great calamity which we have so happily escaped - foreign intervention. Although all the South American republics have been independent through a period of forty or fifty years, yet it cannot be certainly said of any one of them that it has yet definitely accepted and adopted a final constitution. Revolutions have continued to overthrow constitutions there as fast as they have been made. It was unwise, then, to expect that the insurgent states, coming out of their flagrant rebellion, and yet allowed by the Federal Constitution to reconstitute their forms of government for themselves and by their own proper act, in conformity with the Federal Constitution, could all at once adopt constitutions which should be permanently satisfactory to

themselves and to us, in the presence of an entire new condition of society produced by the emancipation of four millions of slaves. What they wanted was "time." What we have wanted was patience. These two wants seasonably indicated the course of popular wisdom in regard to restoration, reorganization, or reconstruction, by whatever name it may be called.

Reliance, however, was justly placed upon the advantages which Abraham Lincoln had for overcoming these embarrassments. Leaving out of view his peculiar moral and intellectual qualities, Mr. Lincoln possessed a decided advantage, in the fact that he had conducted the government with approved fidelity and wisdom through the entire course of the civil war. As the people gave their first confidence to Washington, in organizing the government, upon the ground that he had safely led them through the Revolutionary war ; as the people in 1848 gave their confidence to General Taylor, upon the ground that he had safely led them through the greatest peril of the Mexican war; so the people were expected to give their full confidence to Abraham Lincoln in restoring the Union, because he had led them successfully through the late terrific revolutionary convul sion of the country.

No wise and candid man thought, at that time, either that the war could be ended, or that peace and reconciliation could be effected, under an administration that did not fully enjoy the public. confidence upon two cardinal points, namely, first, the justice of the Union cause in the war; second, the necessity, wisdom, and justice of the abolition of African slavery which the war had effected.

Abraham Lincoln had a still greater advantage. He had been twice chosen by the people themselves to be their President, their civil chief. They were accustomed to his leadership, and they loved him as an accepted impersonation of their own convictions, no matter how varied those convictions might be. They all knew, or believed they knew, him thoroughly. They had committed themselves to his support in advance. His success would be their own success. His failure would be felt and deplored as their own failThus was enlisted in his favor the national pride, the national affection, and the national gratitude. What combinations could have resisted a magistrate thus armed, and aiming only to complete the great and glorious work of saving the Union, which he himself began?

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