prevailed in Montreal and westward before and at the election of 1857; I felt that someone must condone the past, and I determined, so far as I could be supposed to represent your principles, to lead the way. I tried to allay irritated feeling, and I hope not altogether without success.

We have a country, which, being the land of our choice, should also have our first consideration. I know, and you know, that I can never cease to regard with an affection which amounts almost to idolatry the land where I spent my best, my first years, where I obtained the partner of my life, and where my first-born saw the light. I cannot but regard that land even with increased love because she has not been prosperous.

Yet I hold we have no right to intrude our Irish patriotism on this soil; for our first duty is to the land where we live and have fixed our homes, and where, while we live, we must find the true sphere of our duties. While always ready therefore to say the right word, and to do the right act for the land of my forefathers, I am bound above all to the land where I reside; and especially am I bound to put down, so far as one humble layman can, the insensate spread of a strife which can only tend to prolong our period of provincialism and make the country an undesirable home for those who would otherwise willingly cast in their lot among us. We have acres enough; powers mechanical and powers natural; and sources of credit enough to make out of this Province a great nation, and though I wish to commit no one to my opinion, I trust that it will not only be so in itself, but will one day form part of a greater British North American State, existing under the sanction and in perpetual alliance with the empire, under which it has its rise and growth.

PENDLETON

EORGE HUNT PENDLETON, an American congressman, was born at Cincinnati, Ohio, July 25, 1825, and educated at the University of Heidelberg. On his return to the United States he studied law and was admitted to the Cincinnati bar. In 1854 he made his entrance into public life as State senator, and in 1856 was sent to Congress as Democratic representative. While in Congress he served on a number of important committees, and in 1864 was candidate for vice-president on the Democratic ticket with McClellan. In 1866 he was a member of the Philadelphia loyalist convention and three years later was an unsuccessful candidate for the governorship of Ohio. About this time he was somewhat prominent as an advocate of the scheme for payment of bonds in greenbacks. He was elected United States senator in 1878, and while in the Senate procured the passage of the civil service law, but his warm support of this reform prevented his re-election to Congress. In 1885 he was appointed minister to Belgium and died at Brussels while serving in this capacity, November 24, 1889. Pendleton was a man of the most courteous bearing and among his friends was frequently styled "Gentleman George."

ON RECONSTRUCTION; THE DEMOCRATIC THEORY

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MAY 4, 1864

HE gentleman [Mr. Davis of Maryland] maintains
two propositions, which lie at the very basis of his

TH

views on this subject. He has explained them to the House, and enforced them on other occasions. He maintains that, by reason of their secession, the seceded States and their citizens "have not ceased to be citizens and States of the United States, though incapable of exercising political privileges under the constitution, but that Congress is charged with a high political power by the constitution to guarantee republican government in the States, and that this is the proper time and the proper mode of exercising it." This act of revolution on the part of the seceding States has evoked the most extraordinary theories upon the relations of the

States to the Federal government. This theory of the gentleman is one of them.

The ratification of the constitution by Virginia established the relations between herself and the Federal government; it created the link between her and all the States; it announced her assumption of the duties, her title to the rights, of the confederating States; it proclaimed her interest in, her power over, her obedience to, the common agent of all the States. If Virginia had never ordained that ratification, she would have been an independent State; the constitution would have been as perfect and the union between the ratifying States would have been as complete as they now are.

Virginia repeals that ordinance, annuls that bond of union, breaks that link of confederation. She repeals but a single law, repeals it by the action of a sovereign convention, leaves her constitution, her laws, her political and social polity untouched. And the gentleman from Maryland tells us that the effect of this repeal is not to destroy the vigor of that law, but to subvert the State government, and to render the citizens "incapable of exercising political privileges;" that the Union remains, but that one party to it has thereby lost its corporate existence, and the other has advanced to the control and government of it.

Sir, this cannot be. Gentlemen must not palter in a double sense.

These acts of secession are either valid or invalid. If they are valid, they separated the State from the Union. If they are invalid, they are void; they have no effect; the State officers who act upon them are rebels to the Federal government; the States are not destroyed; their constitutions are not abrogated; their officers are committing illegal acts, for which they are liable to punishment; the States have never

left the Union, but, as soon as their officers shall perform their duties or other officers shall assume their places, will again perform the duties imposed and enjoy the privileges conferred by the Federal compact, and this not by virtue of a new ratification of the constitution, nor a new admission by the Federal government, but by virtue of the original ratification, and the constant, uninterrupted maintenance of position in the Federal Union since that date.

Acts of secession are not invalid to destroy the Union, and valid to destroy the State governments and the political privileges of their citizens. We have heard much of the twofold relations which citizens of the seceded States may hold to the Federal government - that they may be at once belligerents and rebellious citizens. I believe there are some judicial decisions to that effect. Sir, it is impossible. The Federal government may possibly have the right to elect in which relation it will deal with them; it cannot deal at one and the same time in inconsistent relations.

Belligerents, being captured, are entitled to be treated as prisoners of war; rebellious citizens are liable to be hanged. The private property of belligerents, according to the rules of modern war, shall not be taken without compensation; the property of rebellious citizens is liable to confiscation. Belligerents are not amenable to the local criminal law, nor to the jurisdiction of the courts which administer it; rebellious citizens are, and the officers are bound to enforce the law and exact the penalty of its infraction. The seceded States are either in the Union or out of it. If in the Union, their constitutions are untouched, their State governments are maintained, their citizens are entitled to all political rights, except so far as they may be deprived of them by the criminal law which they have infracted.

This seems incomprehensible to the gentleman from Maryland. In his view, the whole State government centres in the men who administer it, so that, when they administer it unwisely, or put it in antagonism to the Federal government, the State government is dissolved, the State constitution is abrogated, and the State is left, in fact and in form, de jure and de facto, in anarchy, except so far as the Federal government may rightfully intervene. This seems to be substantially the view of the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Boutwell]. He enforces the same position, but he does not use the same language. I submit that these gentlemen do not see with their usual clearness of vision. If, by a plague or other visitation of God, every officer of a State government should at the same moment die, so that not a single person clothed with official power should remain, would the State government be destroyed? Not at all. For the moment it would not be administered; but as soon as officers were elected and assumed their respective duties it would be instantly in full force and vigor.

If these States are out of the Union, their State governments are still in force, unless otherwise changed; their citizens are to the Federal government as foreigners, and it has in relation to them the same rights, and none other, as it had in relation to British subjects in the war of 1812, or to the Mexicans in 1846. Whatever may be the true relation of the seceding States, the Federal government derives no power in relation to them or their citizens from the provision of the constitution now under consideration, but, in the one case, derives all its power from the duty of enforcing the "supreme law of the land," and in the other, from the power "to declare war."

The second proposition of the gentleman from Maryland