time call in the aid of the central power; but for Congress to assume the functions of the police and itself keep order, is to concern itself with matters which lie beyond and beneath its sphere. But if the central Government has not already the power to hold the State Governments to their duty in this respect, it ought at once to be conferred on it. Unhappily it is to be assumed that the Governments of the Southern States will need supervision of this kind. In that disorganised society, the elements of barbaric discord must get the upper hand at present. Those who have always been loyal to the Union, and those who loyally accept the new condition of things, are in so small a minority that only in one or two of the States have they any preponderance in the Government. How far the unhappy freedmen would be safe under local Governments resting on a mean white' democracy, or even a planter aristocracy, it is, alas, too easy to see. With their slave codes unrepealed, and all the habits and manners of despotic rule unforgotten, such Governments must necessarily become intolerable tyrannies to the coloured race. And even if it is only in a few States that there is danger of such Governments being established, it is a danger against which Congress must provide. But it must do so, if possible, without exceeding the limitations imposed on the central Government, or destroying in any way the local liberties.

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We have already expressed our conviction that a constitu⚫tional amendment' excluding non-voters from the numerical basis of representation, would give the North every needed political guarantee, and would inflict no humiliation on the South. Its great incidental advantage would be, that it would disentangle the question of the freedmen from that of political reconstruction, and would greatly simplify the whole difficulty. It is quite obvious that the necessary corollary of emancipation is, that Congress should have power to protect those whom it has called to a new condition, until they are able to protect themselves. Their case may well be treated as, at present, an exceptional one. They are new members of the Commonwealth for whom a place and function must be found. Congress and the President have emphatically recognised them, the one by requiring of Tennessee, as the condition of reunion, the bestowal of the suffrage on them, the other by publicly welcoming them as his countrymen.' Some means must therefore be found for giving them the rights and privileges of countrymen' of the head of the Republic-of incorporating them with the great American people. It seems to us that in empowering' appropriate legislation' in their behalf, the Constitution makes

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provision for this. And when to this is added the power to guarantee a Republican Government' to every State, all the conditions needful to ample protection are surely present. For the words 'appropriate legislation,' and the phrase 'a Republican 'form of government,' must necessarily be interpreted by the ⚫ fundamental and unchanging principles of the Constitution.' The most fundamental of those principles is that of the political and civil equality of all men. The most unchanging' of them is the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Slavery had caused colour to be a miserable exception to this universal law. But now that slavery is gone the exception is abolished. The chattels are become countrymen.' Appropriate legislation will therefore be that which recognises their position and secures them in their inalienable rights.' State Constitutions which deny these rights, which place them on account of the physical accident of colour in an inferior and outlawed position, which deny them equal civil rights with other members of the Commonwealth, are clearly inconsistent with Republican Government, and Congress must insist on their amendment. A recognition of the coloured men as men must carry with it all the rights and powers which the American Constitution associates with manhood. That Constitution nowhere recognises colour as a disqualification, and the persons held to service,' of whom it speaks, are held to service' no longer. Surely then, black codes and negro disqualifications are unconstitutional, and only those States will have a Republican form of government in a constitutional sense, in which no such distinctions or disqualifications exist. And if Congress should send back the representatives of such States and refuse them recognition until they have purged themselves of these unjust and unequal laws, they will keep within the spirit of their Constitution and will command the sympathy of the civilised world.

The question of negro suffrage differs from that of negro liberty as civil rights differ from political privileges. There is nothing in the constitution of the United States which demands universal suffrage, and in many of the States restrictions on its universality, other than those of colour, still exist. Full justice to the negro includes of course political privileges as well as civil rights, and full adherence to the principles of the Constitution demands that in political as well as civil rights they should be on the same level as the whites. That the time for this will come we have no manner of doubt that it has not yet come is shown by the considerable majorities against negro enfranchisement in Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Minnesota,

and in the Territory of Colorado. The immediate practical difficulty in the way is the obvious unfitness for political responsibility of that vast mass of uneducated and half-civilised negroes, who have but just emerged from slavery. But to apply to them any standard of education, property, or political knowledge, would be to introduce a principle which might soon act in disfranchising multitudes of the whites who now possess the suffrage. In the Southern States, many of the mean 'whites' are almost as ignorant as the most ignorant blacks, and quite as poor. The alternative is to disfranchise them or to enfranchise all the negroes, and both are impossible at present. The negroes must therefore wait, and be content to be insured in the possession of those civil rights which, when once enjoyed, are the sure forerunners of political privileges. In their present condition the possession of the ballot would not enable them to defend themselves-for the violence which may attempt to deny their civil liberty would only the more surely overawe their political liberty. In an exceptional position is their only safety. As wards of the central Government, secured by the appropriate legislation of Congress in the enjoyment of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and placed under the protection of the Supreme Court, they may fit themselves for the political enfranchisement that industry and quiet plodding will be sure to win. It is justice and not favouritism they need-rights, not privileges-protection, not powerequality before the law, not equality in making the law.

We believe that the statesmen and people of the United States feel the gravity of the crisis through which they are now passing. It is indeed impossible that they should exaggerate it, and we respectfully assure them of the sympathy of the great Liberal party, not only in England, but all over Europe. The dangers and difficulties around them now are as great as they were when Lee was threatening Washington and Grant was held in check at Vicksburg. The great war of principles has ended in the field to be begun in the Legislature. The material struggle is over, and its traces will speedily pass away. Roads, railways, and canals will be repaired, towns and cities will be rebuilt; the desolate battle-fields will be covered with crops, and the influx of labour from all civilised lands will soon repair the wastes of war. In a few years the only outward traces of the rebellion will be the names of celebrated battlefields, and the veterans who live on the memory of their deeds. But the moral and social traces of such a convulsion, and the legacies of the evil which caused it, will remain for many generations. For a long future the American people will have the

poor always with them. The freedmen will be a perpetual difficulty, and the questions that gather about them will be a lasting danger. The Union has absorbed into itself millions of selfexpatriated Irishmen, of Germans, and even of Frenchmen; it has now to show whether it can absorb into itself four millions of another race, who have been denied a country, and have lived as outcasts in their native land; whether it can elevate them from the degradation of slavery to the safety and dignity of citizenship; and whether under democratic institutions, and animated by democratic principles, a great nation can be made which shall include all races, all religions, and all climes under one common Federal rule. For such a task, entangled as it is with all the quarrels and passions civil war creates, it may well seem as though human wisdom was insufficient, and under such a burden statesmanship may well falter. But it is only by faithfulness to a great principle that the way has been found through the tangled difficulties of the past, and only a like principle can guide the statesmen of the present. It is no disputed or abstract rule. It is the fundamental and unchanging principle of equal justice to all. This is the moral principle on which the Republic is based. Unfaithfulness to it in the case of one unfortunate and defenceless race has caused the troubles of the past and entailed the difficulties of the present. Once more that race appeals for justice-will the Republic be true to itself and be just to them? On the answer to that question its future depends. Surely the concluding words of the President's Message speak the language of every American:

'Who will not join me in the prayer that the invisible Hand which has led us through the clouds that gloomed around our path will so guide us onward to a perfect restoration of fraternal affection, that we in this day may be able to transmit our great inheritance' of State Governments in all their rights, and the General Government in the whole of its constitutional vigour, to our posterity, and they to theirs through countless generations?'

ART. VIII.-Diary of the Right Honourable William Windham, M.P. (1783-1809). Edited by Mrs. HENRY BARING.

London: 1866.

LUCIAN, in his essay on the question' How true history ought to be written,' passes a severe critical judgment on a writer of his day, who, in an account of some campaign of the Romans against the Parthians, devoted only a few lines to the great and terrible battle of Europus, while he described, in a most undignified and trivial manner, the adventures of one Mausacas, a Mauistanian trooper in the Roman army-how this trooper, falling in with an Assyrian peasant of the neighbourhood who happened to have been in Africa, was received with much good-fellowship, treated to a dinner, and to the narrative of his entertainer's exploits among the elephants and lions in the Sahara, of his landing at Cæsarea on his voyage home, and how much a purchase of fish cost him in the market there. No doubt Lucian, as a critic, is in the right. And yet, so much does the relative interest of past events change as the world gets older, that now, after two thousand years, while there is scarcely one of us who would care a straw for a minute account of that celebrated battle, we should be glad to know more of the Assyrian peasant and his household, and what he thought of Africa and the lions; and would not even despise his statistical information about the fish-market at Cæsarea in the second century. Even so with reference to much later times than these, as our interest in past public events begins to fade away, interest in the private, domestic, gossiping life of those whose fame is connected with them seems to grow even stronger.

William Windham was a man who made, to use a popular phrase, his mark on his age. He did, in his official character, very much towards raising the spirit and improving the position of the British soldier, and rendering him that instrument of marvellous efficiency used by Wellington to reconquer Spain and decide the great European conflict. And for nearly twenty years of that conflict, though others had a greater share in directing its political vicissitudes, few voices were so powerful and so inspiriting as his in rousing that popular enthusiasm by which the battle was finally won. Nobody,' such was Pitt's own judgment of him, according to Lord Stanhope, can be so wellmeaning and so eloquent as he: his speeches are the finest productions possible; full of warm imagination and fancy.' The late Lord Lansdowne,' says Mrs. Baring, when last at

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