this Republic fit to be intrusted with parliamentary government, and at the same time to maintain the separation of the legislative from the executive department, and to preserve to the States their full powers and dignities. Where are the distinguished men, the great judges and lawyers, the great captains on sea or on land, the great merchants, manufacturers, agriculturists, the philosophers and men of letters, the men who most fill the public eye? Some of them are occasionally in the Senate, others in the executive service at home or abroad, and large numbers are in the public service of the several States. This is as it should be under our system, which is one of dispersion, rotation, and distribution. We exclude a large part of our most eminent citizens, and we prohibit all officials, State or national, from seats in Congress. The members of the lower house are practically, though not by law, limited to representing the districts in which they live, consequently the lower house is an assembly of little else than ephemeral, district men, mostly of district reputations. No American who has thought at all deeply upon his country's institutions would dare to confide to such a body greater powers than it now possesses.

It will be said that no such serious change is intended. Doubtless not. Yet we cannot but think that either the proposed measure will entirely fail, or Congress will gain through it a great accession of power, the Presidential office be shorn of its strength, the independence of the executive bureaucracy be seriously impaired, and its great function lost.

Resumption of Specie Payments.

This subject has been so fully discussed heretofore in this Review, and so presented to the public by the press and pamphlets, and by speeches in Congress and before the people, that a repetition of the arguments would be inexcusable. It is not a want of understanding of the subject, so much as it is a reluctance to perform a hard duty, that stands and has always stood in the way. Soon after the close of the war, certain prominent politicians, distrusting the people, as demagogues always do, at the most vital point, that is, their moral sense and intelligence, thought they could ride into power on the wave of public opinion by advocating the payment of the national debt in paper promises to pay. They relied upon the maxim which one of their leaders quoted with approval: “The

public conscience is never awakened by crimes from which the public itself expects to reap some advantage." The public was more honest and intelligent than they supposed, and the national credit was saved. The next attempt of the same class of men was to defraud the national creditors by laying what they called a tax, of ten per cent, upon the interest to be paid on our bonds. This form of repudiation was also rejected by the people. Substantially the same class of politicians have been found opposing the return to specie payments. With some, this is sustained by the theory that the government's promises need not be based upon specie at all; that they may rest entirely upon the vague notion that they command the whole wealth of the country. Doubtless some men of a theorizing turn of mind, not drilled in practical life, may actually believe in this proposition. But with the practical electioneering politicians we believe it to have been put forward, quantum valeat, to cover the practical measure of delaying payment. The objection to specie payment is put forward now almost entirely in behalf of what is commonly called the debtor class, that is, those persons who, having contracted a debt at a lower rate in the value of paper, fear that they must pay it at a higher rate. The injustice and fallacy of this proposition has been repeatedly exposed. Ever since the Legal Tender Act had its natural effect, private promises to pay in the future (except in special contracts to pay bullion as merchandise) have had a speculative value. Both parties to the contract knew that at the time of payment the paper in which it would be made might be worth a great deal more or a great deal less than when the contract was made. Each side took its risk of profit or loss coming from that consideration. All persons engaged in business have known that the market value of the government paper, though with occasional and slight fluctuations, has been steadily rising toward the value of the specie which it nominally represents. It has been matter of speculative opinion among business men whether and how soon it would of itself rise to the value of gold. An act of Congress fixed the time for the resumption of specie payments at January 1, 1879, giving five years' notice to all the world. Under such circumstances there is no reason in the cry that a resumption of payments in specie in 1879 will work injustice upon those who have debts to pay. All these things enter into the motives and considerations of buyer and seller, lender and borrower.

Besides, it must be remembered that the Act for resumption of specie payments is not the measure of a party, but the deed of the country. Our system is government by majorities. The President and the Congress, when elected and instituted into office and in the performance of its public functions, are the agents of the Republic. Whatever they do, within the scope of their authority, partaking of the nature of a promise or an offer on which people have a right to rely, binds the whole country, and must be performed as treaties are performed, irrespective of changes of majority, or, if necessarily abrogated, must be abrogated upon terms consistent with equity and the honor of the country. The public has learned that there is not only a sufficiency but a surplus of government paper in circulation for the business needs of the country, that the issuing of more paper would be folly; and even the most ignorant have come to understand that government paper is not a gift to be equally distributed among communities, but a value which will go only where it is paid for; and there is very little doubt remaining that it is the conviction of the business men of the country that it is fully in our power to secure a return to specie payments by the time designated without any extraordinary strain upon the country, or any other loss to one class of dealers or gain to another than each has taken the risk of and has been bound to prepare for.

Relations of the Republic with the late Rebel States.

Nothing is weaker in statesmanship than indulgence in wishes and afterthoughts. The nation has completed its work of reconstruction, and that has become a part of the settled public law of the country. It has been based upon the equal rights of all, with the gift of the unlimited right of suffrage to the whole body of emancipated slaves, in all their ignorance, weakness, credulity, and brutishness. And we have restored to the exercise of their civil and political franchises the men who but a few years ago were belligerent and bitter enemies of the Republic, the masters of those slaves whom they were determined to hold in subjection, and the advocates and propagators of a slave system, to which they pledged their lives and fortunes, and for which they stood up bravely against the sword, famine, and penury. We early readmitted these States, with such populations and under such influences, to the full exercise of their functions as States internally, and in the administration

of the Republic. If the emancipated slaves did not enter upon the discharge of their political duties mainly ignorant, timid, credulous, and brutish, then slavery was not what we have always believed and represented it to be. If the late masters did not cherish a great deal of resentment against the flag and arms of the Republic, which overthrew their cherished system and brought them down from their proud position as a master race, ruling over four millions of slaves, and holding the substantial political control over the entire Republic; if they have not the desire to regain, in such form as they may, something of their old prestige, then we have been equally mistaken as to the effect of slavery upon the masters. If the result of two hundred years of slaveholding has been the transforming of millions of pagan African negroes into persons capable of at once entering upon the duties of citizens of a republic, capable of administering its complex affairs with skill, patience, and intelligence, or of selecting their own rulers and representatives with judgment, insight, and forecast, we ought frankly to acknowledge that our opposition to slavery was a mistake, and that we should have encouraged instead of restricting its propagation and progress. Believing that we were not mistaken in any of those positions, and having established reconstruction upon those principles, as to which perhaps the genius of our institutions left us no choice, we were bound to contemplate and be prepared for the consequences. The truth is, the antipathies and collisions between the races, and the resentment of the master class against the Republic, have been less than we might well have anticipated. It is true that the ignorance and credulity of the blacks have made them the dupes of the worst of white adventurers from the North, and the two together have brought many of the States into bankruptcy and disgrace. It is not for us to complain, or affect surprise, if the sudden possession of so much power and influence by the late slaves, their sudden transfer from unpaid labor and the crack of the driver's whip to seats in senates and at the receipts of customs, has quite turned the heads and overturned the principles of the best of them. If the large portion of the "mean whites," headed by the worst of the late slavemasters, have taken again to the handling of the knives and guns, in the free use of which they were brought up, and which were necessary to the control of their slaves in the last resort, and use them now to secure their

own political supremacy, it is childish in us to complain, and act as if we were taken by surprise. If a dominant race of educated whites finds it difficult to bear the experience of being outvoted by their late slaves, and of having their small remaining properties mortgaged for public debts contracted by ignorance and fraud, and impatiently takes to unlawful methods of redress, it is no more than should have been foreseen by that common knowledge of human nature which every man, holding himself out as a statesman, is bound to possess. Further, while it is true that the late master race did at the beginning, in their pride and folly, refuse that share of public duties which the reconstruction allowed them, it was no unnatural effect of such a state of affairs upon such tempers as must result from generations of slaveholding. Bound to have foreseen all this, we have embarked upon this plan of reconstruction, and we must carry out the experiment in accordance with the system of the Republic, which is the planetary system, or our system and institutions will disappear together. The States must act with the full powers of States, and the Republic must abide the consequences, unless their action reaches to the point of what is actually and bona fide civil war, or insurrection which cannot be repressed by the authorities of the State. There has been no ground given for fear that any part of the South will rise in insurrection against the Republic. The cases of violence presented, frightful enough, have yet been sporadic, local, and relating to State affairs. Extreme care should be used in applying the military power of the Republic in such cases as these. It is better that the States should learn by sad experience, it is better that we all should suffer, than that the balance should be impaired or destroyed in which the elements of our confederate Republic are held together.

There seem to us to be dangers from two sources so long as this antipathy of races and the struggle between them for political power shall have enough of strength remaining to make it an instrument in the party politics of the Republic. As the history of the political parties has been, it is natural that the manoeuvring leaders of one side should turn to the blacks, and the other to the whites, with faces full of sympathy and hands full of ballots. It is natural that each side should exaggerate the patience and forbearance of their supporters and the incapacity and evil deeds of