around four questions of great but unequal importance. The first of these arises out of the doctrine of State sovereignty, which, though defeated in the field, will yet raise its head in the legislature or the courts. It has been maintained all through the war by the extreme democrats of the North, and by the whole of the South, that laws enacted by the National Congress in the absence of any State from the representation, were unconstitutional and invalid, or, at least, could have no binding power over the absent State. This doctrine would invalidate the whole legislation of the past five years. All the important laws passed by the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth Congresses would have to be at least re-affirmed by the restored States, and in the absence of such re-affirmation would be liable to be repudiated by the State authorities. The Homestead Law, one of the most important measures of late years, and the advantages of which have been extended to the freedmen; the railroad now being made across the desert to the Pacific; the Pension Laws on which widows, orphans, and wounded men rely, in large numbers, for their support; the Freedmen's Bureau, on which for the present their safety depends, and the Public Debt, would all be open to dispute. It will, therefore, be absolutely needful that Congress should demand from the Southern States, as a condition precedent to their complete restoration, the full, irreversible acknowledgment of all that has been done in their absence, or that it should find means of taking from them and their representatives all power to question it.

The second cause of difficulty and anxiety is the distribution of the burden of the Public Debt. The Southern people have perhaps given up all hope that the Federal Government would recognise the Confederate Debt. It must be obvious to them, not only that such recognition is constitutionally impossible, but that the Constitution forbids its recognition by the separate States. Contracted in defiance of the First Article of the Constitution, and for the purpose of destroying that Constitution, it cannot be that secession and rebellion are repudiated if the debt is acknowledged. Nor have the lenders any moral claim either on the Union or on the States. Staking their loan on the success of the Confederate enterprise, and reckoning its chances of success in the price they paid for it, they discounted its failure; and if they reckoned wrongly, this only proves that they had underrated the adverse chances, and overrated the chances of success-a miscalculation that the Southern leaders share with them, but for which the Federal Government can be in no way responsible.

But, on the other hand, it is not at all surprising that the

Southern people should unanimously repudiate all responsibility for the Federal Debt. They have not yet fully realised that they are still part of the Federal Union; and it seems to them to be the last bitter drop in the cup of their humiliation that they should not only be defeated, but should help to pay the cost of their own defeat. Their representatives would therefore, if admitted to Congress, resort to every means of endeavouring to shift this burden from their shoulders. There would be a large, unanimous, and persistent minority in the national legislature, who would feel morally justified in repudiating the debt, who would seize every occasion to protest against it, and who would thus most seriously impair the national credit, and imperil the security of the national creditor. For this manifest danger some certain and effectual remedy must be found; for in strict justice to the other States the South must be made to bear its fair share of the national burden. The debt was incurred in the defence of the Constitution against Southern aggression. According to the very theory on which the Southern States claim to be restored to their legislative rights, the debt was incurred, not to conquer the States as such, but to put down a rebellion of which those States were the seat. To complain of the hardship of bearing part of the Federal Debt, is to complain of coming back into the Union on equal terms with the other States. For the Southern States are either parts of the Union which have been conquered, and have no rights but those which their conquerors may grant them, or they are parts of it which have been the seat of a rebellion which has been put down by the central power, portions of the great whole which were in hostile occupation and have been delivered from it by the Union arms-members of the body on which a terrible disease had fastened, which the bitter medicine of war has cured. In the former view their defeat is sectional, they must accept such terms as the North may grant, and may consider that they are lightly dealt with in coming back on equal terms, with an equal share of public rights and public burdens; in the other view, which is that of the President and his advisers,-the view on which alone the South has a locus standi before the doors of Congress the delivered only help to pay for their deliverance -the patient pays a portion of the doctor's bill. The objection, of the South to a share of the Federal debt is but one application of an argument, the other application of which produces the converse demand that the South shall pay the charges of the war. Southern repudiation of Federal responsibility is a coin in which they might be terribly repaid, for on the obverse of it they will find inscribed the Radical demand for Southern confiscation.

The third difficulty arises out of the Constitution itself; and is one of those legacies of evil that a compromise of principle so often leaves. Comparatively humble as slavery was when the Constitution was founded-for it had not then learned to do more than apologise for its own existence-the Fathers of the Republic, who were most of them slave-owners or citizens of States in which slavery existed, probably did not anticipate the tremendous effects of the conflict between slavery and freedom, and certainly did not regard slavery with the abhorrence it has since excited. At that time, as ever since, the principal Slave States were more thinly peopled than the Free States, and the adoption of the numerical basis of representation in the popular branch of Congress would have reduced them to comparative insignificance there. In order to make the Constitution acceptable to them, and in the vague hope that slavery would not be a permanent institution, it was provided that in the apportionment of voting power to the States, in proportion to their population, three-fifths of the slave population should be added to the whole number of free persons." The effect of this article has been to give to the Southern whites, who alone have the suffrage in any Southern State, an influence in Congress altogether disproportionate to their numbers. In the first apportionment the South got one extra representative for every 50,000 of its slaves. If 30,000 Southern voters held 50,000 slaves they elected two representatives, while a like 30,000 in the North elected only one. The same disproportion has continued ever since. When the war broke out the South had about twenty-five representatives in the House, over and above what they would have had had they voted on the same terms as the freemen of the North; and it has been estimated that every 100,000 voters in the South have exercised the same amount of voting power, and had equal weight in the Congressional representation, with every 130,000 voters in the North.

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* Constitution, Art. I. Sect. 2. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be in'cluded within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free 'persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and 'excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.''Other persons,' is a periphrasis for slaves.

† By the census of 1790 the number of slaves was 697,000. In 1860 the number amounted in round figures to 4,000,000. The apportionment of representatives to population was at first one to every 30,000 freemen and to every 50,000 slaves. It is now one to every 130,000 freemen, and one to every 217,000 slaves.

The emancipation of the slaves will only increase this disproportion. At the redistribution of political power which must take place on the census of 1870, the four millions of quondam slaves, now freedmen, will be added without any deduction to the voting power of the States in which they dwell. But this voting power will all be kept, as it is now, in the hands of whites-eight millions of whom will exercise the political prerogatives of twelve millions. The total result, differing in proportion in different States, will be, that after allowing for the few non-voting free blacks in the North, every 100,000 Southern voters will exercise as much power as 150,000 voters in the North; and two Southern men will weigh as much in the great balance of the Constitution as three men in the North.

It is impossible not to perceive how this inequality increases all the difficulties and multiplies the dangers of the work of ' reconstruction.' Whatever may be the disposition of the Southern States towards the important body of legislation which has been completed in their absence; whatever their dislike of the debt incurred in the defence of the Constitution against them; or whatever their repugnance to the whole policy and results of the legislation against slavery-if they come back under the present arrangement, a factitious power of obstruction is conferred upon them. Quite apart from this, it is already obvious that the division of parties in the reconstructed Union will, for a time, be even more sectional than it was before the war. All the questions which have arisen out of the war and its consequences will constitute, for generations perhaps, a permanent division between North and South. Nothing can therefore be more reasonable than that the North should be reluctant to give their opponents this great advantage in the political conflict, or should be inclined to deny them the prospective greater advantage the Constitution promises them. Based as the United States Government is on the principle of equality of duties and of rights among all classes of the citizens, it is not likely that the North will consent to continue an arrangement which outrages that principle to its own great disadvantage. Nor should the South refuse to sanction a Constitutional Amendment which will remove the inequality. It is defensible on no principle-and it serves to perpetuate that invidious sectional distinction out of which the difficulties of the past arose. Originally inserted as a peaceoffering to the South, it should now be sacrificed as a peaceoffering to the North. The purchase-price, in some senses, of their original adherence to the Constitution, it would be only statesmanlike and just to pay it back again now, as the

purchase-price of their own re-admission to the privileges of the Union. We are not without hope that this may be done. The North will assuredly be justified in demanding it-it would be no humiliation to the South to give it. As a pledge of good faith, a token of reconciliation, and a bond of future peace, it would be all that is at present needful. Even the sacrifice of political power need not be final. A few years of domestic legislation in the spirit of such a compromise would enable the South to win back in a legitimate way much of the factitious power they would now resign. They have but to make the negroes really free, and to treat them well, to make them their fastest friends. They have but to educate and elevate them, and give them, as they rise to be worthy of it, the powers and privileges of citizenship, and they will make them political disciples, adhering to the policy, and even exaggerating the passions and prejudices, of their superiors. It is one hopeful circumstance among many that are discouraging, that some of the best men of the South already perceive this. Mr. J. H. Reagan, the Postmaster-General of the Confederacy, has pleaded for this policy before his fellowcitizens of Texas; and in the Legislature of Virginia it has been eloquently and forcibly argued that the freedman is arbiter of the situation, that the true contest between North and South will hereafter be for political influence over him, and that in such a contest the South must win. The conditions of such a success are not easy, but they are by no means impossible—

But great as all these political difficulties and dangers are, they are, at least, tolerably definite, and admit of removal by wise and generous statesmanship. The other difficulty, which increases these while they last, and will remain when they have been removed, is social as well as political, and is surely as vast and terrible an one as ever tried the patience of statesmen or the endurance of a people. The reconstruction of the labour system of half a continent would of itself be one of the most gigantic tasks which ever fell to the lot of any statesman. But when there is added to it the reconstruction of the Government itself, and political difficulties come in to render the social difficulty more dangerous and complicated, the task is one from which the boldest of statesmen may shrink. The abolition of serfdom in European countries has but little in common with the abolition of American slavery. Yet in Russia, with a strong and unquestioned central authority, with ample time for