up that system. Those portions of the people who may consider themselves oppressed and wronged fly to the military for protection, because they have found it efficient heretofore. The general government is constantly importuned to interfere upon every sort of pretext, and many statutes have been enacted to make such interference legal, until there is a danger that it may be drawn into precedent and become a common recourse. The great constitutional barriers which our fathers erected with such painstaking care and foresight, against the encroachments of power upon the liberties of the people, have been more or less arrested, one after another, until the time has arrived when it is necessary to look into these assumptions and consider whither they tend. None of the safeguards of liberty which experience has proved to be essential can safely be set aside for any cause not of the most serious nature, and then only in pursuance of settled laws. The Constitution of the United States has declared in section nine of the first article, that "the privilege of the Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when in case of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." And yet a proposition has lately been made in Congress in a time of profound peace to authorize the President at his discretion to suspend the writ until the fourth of March next. The proposition passed the Senate, and was only defeated in the House by the most strenuous exertions. It seemed to me a very startling proposition considering all the circumstances that surrounded it. The President of the United States, with the power in his hands to suspend that writ at his pleasure, is a dictator in fact, whatever he may be called. It is in the power of his single will to shut up all the courts in the country, to arrest every person in the land by armed soldiery, without a warrant, and to imprison at discretion any citizen who may have incurred the displeasure of the government. This power is so vast and so dangerous that nothing short of the actual existence of the emergencies contemplated by the constitution could for a moment justify it. That it should have been contemplated at all is an evidence of the great progress made within the last four years in those principles and practices which easily justify the use of arbitrary power. There has been no invasion or rebellion, and there is no reason to apprehend either. What, then, was the purpose of this attempt to authorize the suspension of the writ in time of peace? Was it any well-grounded fear that the occasion might occur in which it might lawfully be done, or was it intended to exercise the power against the law in a certain event? Whatever may have been the design of those who set the scheme on foot, it was frustrated altogether, and the result has been anything but satisfactory to them, as I believe every such effort in the future will be. It is now several years since the war closed. The States have all been restored and are represented in Congress. Is it not time that war legislation should cease? If it is not, when will it be? Are we to go on forever, as if a new rebellion was just about to break out? Shall we never again trust the people with the control of their own affairs? Has local self-government already failed, and must we bring in the mailed Cæsar at once? Perhaps these are vain questions, as I know many regard them, but with very many others they are of the most serious import, and surely it will never be out of order for the American people to consider carefully the drift of public affairs. It is their especial duty to know just what is the meaning of public acts which are in themselves unusual and which seem to lead us in the wrong direction. What remains for us is restoration. We need to clear away all the rubbish of the war; to put behind us all old conflicts which have no longer any meaning. Why nurse the enmities. which grew out of slavery after slavery itself is dead? Why continue to indulge the spirit of war long after war has ceased? Why enact laws of doubtful constitutionality in hope of accomplishing by intimidation what could be much more easily done by conciliation and good will? Why maintain exasperating disabilities after all occasion for them has passed away? A union that rests upon force is not the union established by our forefathers. Force was necessary for a temporary object, but cannot, must not, take the place of statesmanship in our institutions. Reason is the power on which we must rely, with patriotism for the motive to give it direction. Our government is one of the people, and its appeal is always to the good sense and patriotism of the people. Let no man doubt the safety of that appeal in every part of the land. Interest, hopes, ambition, all combine to unite our whole population in one vast National Commonwealth under a Constitution which secures abundantly the rights of all. We want peace, indeed, real, enduring peace, based on mutual interests and common respect. We want order secured by the institution of peace; the court and jury and not the soldier with his bayonet, who never did and never can secure it—not the peace of a desert made by fear, but the blooming, wholesome peace that respects the rights and liberties of all men! FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR (1821-1875) URING and after the Civil War the decisive balance of power was held in a territory extending from the eastern line of Ohio to the western line of Missouri and from the latitude of Springfield, Illinois, on the north to the southern boundary of Kentucky. The question of keeping Missouri and Kentucky in the Union was the vital question of 1861, and it was decided when Frank P. Blair, with characteristic force, rallied the supporters of the Union in Missouri for the defense of the St. Louis arsenal and its 65,000 stands of arms. When, as major-general in the army of General Sherman, he led the Seventeenth army corps on the march to the sea, his services were more brilliant without being more important. The control of the Mississippi and its great confluent streams, the Ohio, the Missouri, and especially the Tennessee, was the decisive factor of the struggle in the Mississippi Valley, and hence in the entire country. The final result was really involved as a logical necessity at the very beginning when the arsenal at St. Louis was held and the State of Missouri kept in the Union. Once more, after the close of the war, it fell to Blair to lead men whose influence conclusively and unmistakably determined the course of events, though they were in a minority, representing the views of the masses of neither of the great parties as they then were. He stood in the politics of that period for devotion to the Union, and for strong objection to the reconstruction of the government on a basis which was not contemplated during the progress of the war. In his speech on the Fifteenth Amendment he expressed the idea which controlled not only his own course after the war but that of the powerful element he represented as the Democratic nominee for vice-president on the ticket with Seymour. "Have we a Federal Union on a constitutional basis?" he asked. "Are the States equal in political rights? Is the central government acting within constitutional limitations? What is the whole system of reconstruction as it is called, this exclusion of States from their inherent and guaranteed rights? Taxation without representation, their fundamental laws set aside, the popular will suppressed, the right of suffrage taken from the States by an usurping fragment of Congress, the Federal Constitution itself changed in its character by the same usurping fragment and in defiance of the known and expressed will of the people?» The politics of more than a decade were directly determined by the idea which is condensed into these sentences. The Liberal Republican movement which began in Missouri and in one way or another decided the course of events until it forced the nomination of Garfield, had its real beginnings when Blair came home after the march to the sea and refused to follow the Republican party beyond the surrender at Appomattox. In considering the work of men so earnest in their purposes and so reckless of personal considerations in carrying them out as Blair was, the critical faculties refuse to respond to the demand made upon them. We do not ask "Is he right? Is he wrong? Is he for us or against us?" but rather how he came by the intense and fiery energy which compels him in his action as it gives him strength for the struggle. His characteristic energy showed itself when he took the lead in the fight against the test oaths which were proposed immediately after the close of the war. The case of Blair versus Ridgely, one of the most important in American history, was brought by him on the theory that the constitutional clauses and enactments requiring test oaths and providing punishments for refusal to comply with such requirement were in the nature of a bill of attainder and ex post facto. This case and others of the same nature were carried to the United States Supreme Court which upheld the theories of those who opposed test oaths as in violation of the Federal Constitution. Blair was born in Lexington, Kentucky, February 19th, 1821. graduate of Princeton, educated for the bar in Washington, he located in St. Louis, but ill-health and the necessity for the open air sent him to lead the life of a trapper in the Rocky Mountains. He enlisted as a private in the Mexican War and, after his return, edited the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis. From the campaign in 1848, when he sided with the Free Soil Democrats until after the close of the Civil War, he held the middle ground between the extreme South and the extreme North. Elected to Congress as a Republican in 1856, he advocated colonizing the negroes of the South under an arrangement with Spanish-American countries. In 1866, when nominated for Collector of Internal Revenue at St. Louis, and for Minister to Russia, he was rejected by the Senate for both offices—a fact which probably helped to secure his nomination on the Democratic National ticket in 1868. He was elected United States Senator from Missouri in 1871, and died July 10th, 1875. THE CHARACTER AND WORK OF BENTON (Delivered at the Unveiling of the Benton Statue in St. Louis) People of Missouri: THE HE highest honor ever conferred on me is that of being called on by you to speak on this occasion. To express the gratitude of a great State to its greatest public benefactor; to represent a generous, proud-spirited, yet fond, affectionate community, paying its homage to the exalted genius that cherished its own infancy with a devoted feeling exceeding the instinct which attaches the parent to its new-born offspring; to express the sentiment that swells the heart of Missouri, now elevating to the view of the whole country the imperishable form of her statesman who gave his whole career to her faithful service in the most trying times,- this to me is a most grateful duty, however impossible it may be to discharge it adequately. Your indulgence in assigning me to this honor I know proceeds from the partial kindness always extended to me by the man whose memory your present ceremonies and the monument they consecrate are designed to perpetuate. It is a recollection of this, his personal partiality, that clothes me with your favor, and his great merits will, in your eyes, cover all the imperfection of my efforts to body them forth again. A keynote from my feeble voice will strike the chord in your bosoms requiring no pathos from mine. All nations, especially free and highly-endowed, cultivated commonwealths, have raised monuments to such of their children as distinguished them by illustrious labors elevating their country to renown. The bond which leads to this so-called "heroworship" emanates from the sort of self-love which, spreading among a whole people endued with like sympathies, converges in the individual in whose character they perceive the exalted elements that signalize their own genius as a people. Hero-worship in enlightened nations is directly the reverse of the idolatry that springs up in savage ignorance and supplants intelligence by superstition. The Christian religion, in its magnificent monuments and emblems, gives the senses clear conceptions of the life, the body, the moral excellence, and even the sufferings of the Savior. By addressing the senses as well as the reasoning faculties and the sympathies of our nature, it gives embodiment to the thought and feeling which arise from our devotion, with the aspiration which enables it to incorporate with itself the |