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first balloting would or would not sustain a thoroughly radical That would depend upon circumstances somewhat. For they are so little accustomed to such legislation, they might need time in which to become acquainted with it.

But have we not had a sufficient trial of the methods of policy? In this country our public men have had two things in view, the safety of the Union, and their own position in office. For these ends they have used compromise and equivocation. Do we need any additional evidence to prove the fatuity of the one, and the poor success of the other? Compromises have failed utterly to achieve any other result than evil. And those men who hold their places in Congress for the longest period are the Sumners, Wades, Stevenses; men who in all their political life have never failed to lead and form the public opinion, appealing to the judgments of the people, oftentimes far in advance; men who have won just fame, not only for measures they have carried in the service of justice, but for their opposition to, and defeat of much vicious legislation.

I have said that there would seem to exist at the present time the opportunity to inaugurate a new era in the conditions of human And that in this movement it is our opportunity to lead. progress. It is so by virtue of our claim, and by the weight of all our bitter experience in following the old methods. We have been educated, let us trust, up to the position. If we are not yet ready to do right by a natural love of right, surely we have good reason for believing that the old saying is a faithful one, that the best policy, even, is honesty. And as he has been rated the wisest statesman in the past by the country at large, who could best play the national game of compromise, so, contrarywise, in the future, statesmanship shall be acknowledged to be the uncompromising application to the business of the Republic of Republican principles. Has not the war brought the poor game of compromise to an end? We have in the disposition of the people, and in the attitude of Congress, some warrant for the belief. Yet it is by no means certain that our reliance upon principles is equal to our emergency. In our eagerness to restore what we term " the peace of the country,' we run the risk of a surrender. As matters stand now, there is danger lest we make too great haste. The resolutions introduced into the Senate but yesterday by Senator Stewart, have this look of mischief, if none other. It is certainly never desirable to continue an 'excited' state of affairs a moment longer than is really necessary. But it is not so important to the country to reach an early settlement, as it is that it reach a just one.

We need for this hour the fullest distrust of expediency, come in what friendly guise it may. We can better postpone action for five years than now make a false move. There is no demand for haste. There is only the demand for honest dealing. If we are not equal to that to-day, let Congressmen come home and have a talk with their constituents. Let them go to the people with an honest purpose; they will get a fair hearing, and a strong support, and a new executive at Washington. If this is all a mistake, then the victory is postponed for the next generation. The education of the country is not completed.

It is the warning given by the foes of impartial liberty in America, who have a great sympathy for the same cause in Ireland, that the delay of the restoration of the Southern States to their privileges in the Union, must inevitably harden that people into undying hatred to the country, as, for example, the British Government has done with the people of Ireland. The fact that an American could see in the two cases any possible analogy, invalidiates his capacity to form any true judgment in the case at all. While England insists upon a manifest injustice to Ireland, our Congress demands of the South only the guarantee of no further injustice on its part to four millions of people, as intelligent, as brave, as unoffending, as are those whom England has for centuries oppressed. True, this may embitter the South to a great degree, for it yet believes in its right to thus oppress the negro, and claims the old privilege of doing so as a State's Right within the Union. But no people can forever hold out against the enforcements of justice. They are themselves drawn by its beneficent sway into its advocacy. They will be glad to confess their mistake, and forsake their sin. And instead of hating the power which baffled their evil designs, they will come to persuade themselves that they were never in opposition to it: just as we find very many good people in the North to-day, whom the war has converted into "lifelong abolitionists." We can bind the South in devotion to the country only in the bonds of justice.

Whether we will apply this justice now, or consent to another half century of mutual jealousy in guarding a weak, shameful compromise, hatching a brood of evils such as no foresight can adequately picture

- is the question that confronts the nation at this time. It has the antidote of justice, of principle, against a lingering disease of policy that is shaped in cowardice, blindness and ingratitude.

We may begin now in earnest, if we will, this movement for National reconstruction. We may erase the past and start aright. The past.

should be known as the epoch of policy at the expense of our principles. We can begin an epoch of loyalty to confessed principles. The epoch of disaster would close. The epoch of peace and good-will throughout the entire land would begin. The nation, lured by the happy sway of Freedom, would come at last to love all her paths, and save its Soul alive and strong to bless the whole brotherhood of Man. EDITOR.

REVOLUTIONS.

BEFORE Man parted for this earthly strand,
While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,

God put a heap of letters in his hand,

And bade him make with them what word he could.

And Man has turned them many times: made Greece,
Rome, England, France:—yes, nor in vain essay'd
Way after way, changes that never cease.

The letters have combin'd: something was made.

But ah, an inextinguishable sense

Haunts him that he has not made what he should.
That he has still, though old, to recommence.
Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And Empire after Empire, at their height
Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on.
Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,
And droop'd, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day thou say'st there will at last appear
The word, the order, which God meant should be.
Ah, we shall know that well when it comes near:
The band will quit Man's heart:- he will breathe free.

From his Published Poems.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

SURSUM CORDA!

BY MONCURE D. CONWAY.

"THE French made in 1789, the greatest effort ever made by a people, to cut in two, so to speak, their destiny, and to fix an impassable gulf between what they had hitherto been, and what they would thereafter be. With this aim they have taken all sorts of precautions to import nothing of the past into their new condition; they have imposed all kinds of constraints to make themselves other than their fathers; they forgot nothing that would help make them unrecognizable as the same people. I have always thought that they were much less successful in this brave enterprize than has been believed in foreign countries, and than was at first believed among themselves. I am convinced that they have retained from the old order the greater part of the sentiments, habits, ideas, even with the aid of which they had conducted the Revolution which had destroyed it, and that without their will they had preserved its debris to construct the edifice of the new society to such an extent that to comprehend the Revolution and its work, we must forget for a moment the France which we see, and go to interrogate in its tomb the France that is no more." *

T

HESE remarkable words, coming from one whose authority no American surely can question, have been haunting me so much lately that I begin to fear that they are a warning of what is to come of our own great revolution. Nothwithstanding the baptism of our soil with consecrated blood; notwithstanding the dreary tragical experiences of nearly a century; it really seems as if Americans meant to take the debris of the old Union—the contempt of the lowly, the hatred of the negro, the hunger for gold, though coined out of human hearts, and with these build the new structure. "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" some enthusiastic optimists will cry. Nevertheless, America did once declare all men free and equal, and then proceed to sanction the slave trade and the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. America began with the Declaration of Independence, but reached at last the Dred Scott decision. These horrible degradations do take place among nations; and if I mistake not, that if we go to the tomb of the old Union we shall find much resemblance between it and that of to-day. President Johnson occupies precisely the same attitude toward the demand of his time, that Buchanan occupied toward the demand of his time. Mr. Raymond is standing in the shoes of Mr. Crittenden. We are now, as then, invited to cement the Union with the blood of the negro. And the same trade which ruled in the old Union; which bought and sold negroes and politicians, cotton and principles, is now trying to barter

* From the Preface to De Tocqueville's "L'ancien Regime et la Revolution. »

for its own immediate re-establishment all that the noble blood shed in four years had seemed to gain. For the sake of clamorous trade the "compromises of the Constitution" were made; and it seems that for the same a new Union with similar compromises is to be made. The thunders of Sinai which have published eternal laws to our stricken land have scarcely been hushed, and the golden calf is already worshipped by the crowd. The conflagration that has raged in America for a generation has revealed how much of the house we were living in is perishable material, how much is permanent solid work. It has shown that the inequality of representation in the Senate has made that body an iron band around a tree striving to grow Connecticut with her few thousand, could veto New York with her millions. It has shown that where each representative must live in the district and state he represents, local selfishness and individual self-interest take the place in legislation of public spirit, and that Western adventurers must checkmate the action of cultivated men. It has shown that by the Electoral Colleges less than a fourth of the people would presently elect the President. It has shown that the sweeping out of every officer by each incoming party, kept competent men out of the public business, and filled each department with men intent only on making the most money they could out of the country during their brief stay. It has shown that by the representation of slaves a premium was put upon wrong, and men were empowered to make laws for free men in proportion as they violated the rights of free men. It has shown that each President, by his reeligibility, has been made (with rare exceptions) a reckless intriguer for a second term of office; and that the 30,000 offices placed at his disposal were only so much money to bribe politicians to support him. In short, the great conflagration has revealed that the seemingly solid walls about us, were but stucco and terra cotta, our oak but veneering, our decorations shoddy. There is not a thinking man in America but must see that any permanent reconstruction" must imply a reconstruction of the whole organic law of the country. But what power have thinking men in America? What do Republican Institutions come to if we can never get a first class man into the government, if the Phillipses, Emersons, Whittiers, Lowells, Sumners, Stevenses, Wades, Schurzes, are to be underfoot of ignorant and vulgar tailors and tinkers? There is nothing sadder under the sun, than to see that which is noble overruled and humiliated by the ignoble.

Now it seems to me that those men in America who acknowledge an allegiance to Reason and Principle, are not doing all they can to

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