ute of respect and regard for the minister; for he knows and they know and every body knows that the sole public impression is that poor Blank must be very sore pressed indeed when he is eloquently grateful for fifty cents, or a new hat, or a coat, or whatever it may be. The whole ceremony is Mrs. Grundy's attempt to eat her cake and have it at the same time. A conscientious clergyman is the hardestworked man among us; and yet there are very many who look upon him as a kind of drone in the great hive, and who have a vague idea that he is pretty well paid for doing very little! It is this half-contemptuous feeling which Dr. Wayland, the chief of the Baptist clergy, had in mind when he said, in his caustic way, to a meeting of some of his religious friends: "Brethren, if one of you has a lazy, good-for-nothing son, about whom you are in despair, you are sure to make a Baptist minister of him." If that is the feeling, how can we expect our children to care or to wish to go to church? And yet what right have we to expect that another kind of man will be satisfied with the pittance, we pay? The most shining proof of the generally noble character of the clergy is that, despite the pittance, they are not the kind of men Dr. Wayland described. But they do want more independence. They do want to tread down Mrs. Grundy under their feet. To an Easy Chair, whose duty it is to keep an eye upon the pleasant aspects of the world, and to roll itself about among the minor paths of manners and customs, it is very obvious that we must be under some curious illusion concerning the Opera in London. We are accustomed to consider it one of the great operatic capitals. It is reckoned with St. Petersburg and Paris as one of the cities in which the most celebrated singers wish to appear. And they do appear. Malibran and Grisi and Jenny Lind were all stars of the London heaven-alas! unhappy were! It was only the other day that the account was published in an English paper of the recent appearance of Jenny Lind at some provincial city in a work of her husband's, and the result was painful. Her voice was gone! Such a loss is as absolute as the extinction of a star. Voices remain and stars; but the lost Pleiad-! Naturally, therefore, we suppose the standard of the London Opera to be very high-to be, in fact, quite beyond our own. And there are very worthy people who basely sneer at the Irving Place Opera, because they are very sure it is so lamentably inferior to that over the sea in London. Yet it is a fact that it is Irving Place which has given to London and Paris the most admired and successful primà donna since Jenny Lind in Adelina Patti, and now close upon the majestic and fascinating Nilsson at "Her Majesty's," in London, comes our very familiar friend Miss Clara Louisa Kellogg, and sings in Faust, in Nilsson's own rôle, to a crowded and brilliant house, to the Prince of Wales, Prince and Princess Christian, Prince and Princess Edward of Saxe-Weimar, and who knows how many dukes and duchesses, marquises and marchionesses, earls and countesses, viscounts and viscountesses, and what sparkling mob of lesser lords and ladies and mere untitled gentry-and is declared to be the equal of Nilsson and Titiens and Patti and Carvalho and all the melodious rest, her success "more triumphant, it may be, from the memories." Her Have we been entertaining nightingales and larks and wood-thrushes unawares? Season after season has the Kellogg been singing, and we listening, and thinking it very well and very sweet and very pretty, when it was the easy rival, if not superior, of the best of living singers! Goodness gwacious! as Fopling says, what have we been about? Some of the jeunesse dorée, poring over the photographs of Nilsson, have wondered what could tempt her to these thankless and longing shores; and pleasantly listening to the Kellogg they have been indeed very grateful but wholly unsuspecting that this was more than Nilsson, more than Carvalho. It can not be denied. Her success has been very great. first appearance transcended in enthusiasm that of Adelina Patti. "Certainly," says the critic of the Times, "Miss Kellogg displayed extraordinary powers, both as actress and singer, and created an immense impression. Miss Kellogg is not only a splendid and brilliant singer, but a consummate actress as well. She evidently thinks for herself, and her acting is to be praised no less for its natural ease and unstudied grace than for its originality......In fine, the new singer has every thing in her favor to insure a great success Iand to raise her into high favor. She possesses a voice of rare quality-silver-bright, liquid, emotional to a degree, and sympathetic. She sings with art, feeling, judgment, and supreme taste; as an actress she would make her fortune in the drama, and her appearance is highly prepossessing." As we read these delightful words do we not all close our eyes for a moment and see Miss Clara Louisa Kellogg on the morning after her appearance seated before the fire in comfortable wrapper and slippers reading them also? How she must like London! How kindly and friendly seems every thing in that dull, dark city! How honest and hearty this generous welcome! Then her eyes close, too, perhaps, as she foresees that brief and bright career so alluring and overpowering to the imagination of the young singer. And we, poor plodders of Broadway! why didn't we know all this? How often has she not sung to thin houses? How often have not the papers praised feebly, unconscious of the goddess! How staid have been our epithets, how subdued our admiration! Yet when she returns how eagerly we shall welcome her, and remind our friends that we always knew, and, as they will remember, always said, that the Kellogg was peerless. Is she then different in London? Or is it that a singer hath no honor in her own land? Or is it that the accessories of "Her Majesty's" have greatly helped her? Or is it that London is more easily satisfied than New York? Or is it that Europe has at last become conscious of America? Whatever it be let us rejoice that the industrious and devoted singer has met such a sunburst of welcome, and that her path in Europe is likely to be so flowery. THE farewell dinner to Mr. Dickens in London was one of the feasts in which we are all interested, and at which we would all gladly have been guests. It was curiously symbolical of the hold which Dickens has not upon a class but upon mankind at large, for those who sat down at the table were of every profession, and illustrious in every profession, and they came to honor the chief of his own calling in literature. Beside the most noted of his own guild-and among them was Lord Lytton, whom we know as Bulwer, who presided-there were the artists in great force, merchants, men of science, lawyers, travelers, soldiers, sailors, and " common gentlemen." It was a banquet which every one of those who were present will always remember with peculiar satisfaction, and which must have been to Dickens himself one of the brightest events of life. It was so much music compressed into one strain! It was a noble and beautiful homage of fame to fame. Smaller men "mutually admire." But Bulwer, and Lord Cockburn, and Millais, and Landseer, Professor Owen, and Tennyson, and Buckstone, do not prop their reputations upon each other: their applause is single, and their admiration and sympathy are sincere. If Thackeray had been living he too would have been there; and although his words would have been wonderfully hearty and racy, spoken in that rich, deep voice, he would have looked a great deal at the President sitting at the head of the table, and he would have reflected upon the Presidential reflections. For Bulwer was famous, and Thackeray had sharply and incessantly satirized him before Dickens had ascended the throne. There was a time, easily within the remembrance of those who are not yet old (when are we old?) -say about the time when Willis was writing his "Pencilings by the Way"-when Bulwer was the great name among the English novelists and Disraeli disputed his laurels. Since that time Bulwer has been steadily busy writing works, devoted, as the terrible Thackeray used to say, to the Good, with a great G, the Beautiful, with a great B, and the True, with a great T. But he has seen himself overtaken and passed in the great race by the young reporter of the Morning Chronicle, and by his own insatiate satirist. He is a lord, and his position in literature is very conspicuous, and he has defended in Parliament all the respectable policies and the solid interests of the solid men; but the glorious guild of literature and art has never united with all other pursuits and offered him such a tribute of the heart as this farewell dinner to Dickens. The old readers of Bulwer-his literary diocese, as it were-have always undoubtedly associated him with his own Pelham, as the poetical church of Byron always see their saint in Childe Harold. That Bulwer was a dandy has always been their secret belief; and it is curious now, for the old readers of Bulwer, who wear easier shoes and care less about their cravat ties than they did when they wept over the woes of Nydia and Madeline, to read of Pelham as still Pelham, but Pelham with a w-g, and hair d-e, and padd-g! He is thus painted at the Dickens dinner by a correspondent of the Tribune: "Lord Lytton, the Chairman, rises. He is excessively dressed up, and can not suppress his vanity. Over sixty, Bulwer does not look fifty-but he is 'made up': his hair, and beard, and eyebrows are too dark not to excite suspicion. Voices are the real tests of age; and when he spoke it was the voice of a past generation. Disraeli himself has not such a Jewish face as Bulwer, whose nose is almost a caricature of the aquiline. There is unmistakable power in every line of his face, however; his body is a phantasm in which his tailor may believe. His speaking is ingeniously bad. It is the ideal of the style of a hard-shell Baptist preacher far away in old Virginia. A hard, convulsive word or two-a long drawl— terminated by a jerk, at which the forehead is thrown down until the audience sees the back of the head: this is the history of one of Bulwer's rasping, unpleasant sentences. He throws his hand (with faultless cuffs) straight out; clasps the fingers tightly to the palm, then draws it in under his arm as a man would pulling in a gudgeon-and that is his gesture. He should appear only in print. To those who could shut their eyes (as I did) and listen to what he said, his speeches on Saturday were very good indeed. Bulwer's felicitous and generous speech introducing Dickens has probably been read by many of our friends. But at a later hour in the evening, when "the ladies" were to be toasted, Mr. Pelham showed that he was as capable as ever of a neat sonnet to his lady's eyebrow. The galleries were filled with gentle guests beaming benignant upon the lords of creation upon the floor, and as he raised his eyes to the sparkling crowd of witnesses, Mr. Pelham said, and no chairman ever said it more prettily: "Before sitting down you will allow me to propose a toast the health of that part of this audience which every writer of polite letters is the most ambitious to please. I mean those who are our gentlest critics, but who, at the same time, are the most formidable rivals whenever they condescend to compete with us as authors. It has been said that man was born to look upward and contemplate the stars. I now look upward and in contemplating the stars I propose the health of the ladies.' ciferous applause followed for Heaven's last, best gift to man, from those who valued it too much to expose it to the perils of the table, which they, as the baser sex, were not too fine to encounter. Vo But there was one incident at this memorable banquet which was very interesting. More than forty years ago a young Englishman, just from college, printed in Paris a slight volume of verses for private circulation, and dedicated it to a brother collegian who was studying law, and for whom the poet predicted the highest honors in his profession. At the Dickens dinner the Lord Chief-Justice of England, in proposing a toast in honor of the chairman, said that it was an infinite source of gratification and delight to him to do it, for it took him back to the time when he and the noble lord started in life. The noble lord, the famous author Bulwer, was the poet of forty years ago, and the Lord Chief-Justice who proposed his health was the law student, to whom he dedicated his little volume. Lord Cockburn did not spare praise, and ended with this feu de joie: "In the toast I have to propose let me embody the hope that for long years our noble friend may continue to contribute to the literary glory of our country; and that in that august assemblage to which by a wise and just exercise of the prerogative of the crown, and with the universal approbation of all thinking men he has been elevated, the eloquent orator will not be silent, but will continue in that path of glory and renown he has so long trod with so much honor to himself and advantage to the country." Lord Lytton, not to be outdone, gave the Lord Chief-Justice a region of Mr. Representative Chanler's 'vox popRowland for his Oliver: "I remember as if it uli, vox Dei. Like Charles Lamb, Halleck was were yesterday the pride I had in every exhibition wedded to an accountant's desk. He was a clerk of those remarkable talents which have since be- of Jacob Barker's, and later of John Jacob Ascome the admiration of our Parliament and now tor's. His enjoyment of the city and its life reflect lustre on our Bench.' was evidently intense; and it is now said that How sorry those must always be who were un- after he returned to his native village of Guildable to get tickets to that dinner! verse. ford, where he died, he used to come to the city on the Fourth of July! How vainly and vaguely at last he must have looked about for his New York; and when St. Tammany's temple passed into profane hands, the flaneur of fifty years ago must have felt that his own hour was near. FITZ-GREENE HALLECK was of a former generation in literary association, and the news of his death probably surprised many who supposed that he had been long dead. His name is traditional in our literature, and will not be forgotten, for he was one of the group of fifty years To the younger literary men he was little ago who first made our literature distinctive, al-known. Mr. Tuckerman was one of his comthough not original. To-day Halleck's poems panions; and the Easy Chair, some years since, read more like vers de societé than like serious used occasionally to happen in at the office of They seem like the sparkling effusions the urbane Mr. Sparrowgrass just after Halleck of a clever and cultivated man of the world, gen- had gone out. But it was always just after; and erally afraid of sentiment, turning it into ridicule the Easy Chair will always regret that he never at the end, but very sentimental when the mood came nearer to him than smelling the smoke of holds. Yet in Marco Bozzaris there is a superb his cigar. He was a man of various scholarship, lyrical movement, worthy a great poet; and in and, as all his companions report, of a remarkthe lines upon the death of Drake an elegiac able social genius. His literary ambition was melody quite unsurpassed. It was with a few early quenched, or his timidity was insuperable. such strokes that Halleck made his reputation, Except a poem in the Ledger, and another in and he did not disturb it. The collections of the Knickerbocker Gallery, we recall nothing of his poetry do not contain forty pieces, none of Halleck's since the earlier day. them very long, and most of them of a local and limited interest and significance. This genera-week of October, and returned ill to his home at tion, for instance, can not enjoy the peculiar humorous allusion of Fanny, although it is easy to feel a masterly facility in execution, and a lyrical temperament. Halleck was last in New York in the second His sis Guildford on the 14th, "with a presentiment,' writes a friend, "that he would never again gaze upon the busy scenes of the great metropolis. He died suddenly at last on Tuesday, NoHalleck's active life was passed in the city of vember 19, in his seventy-eighth year. New York at that remote and mythical era when ter and his cousin, each eighty years old, and it was not a foreign city. There is a singular troops of friends, followed him to the village pleasure in reading the verse which suggests the grave-yard. One who describes the simple and presence in city politics of the descendants of the modest ceremony, so harmonious with the charancient settlers. Since our rulers came from be-acter of the man, quotes at the end of his letter yond the sea we should like to see any bard at- a few lines from Edmund Spenser, one of Haltempt to make any association with municipal leck's favorite authors:' affairs romantic. What would Halleck have said if he had known that east of the Bowery, in this roaring Bedlam, the native vote is less than two per cent. of the whole. That is the especial 66 "Here may thy storme-beet vessel safely ryde, O Monthly Record of Current Events. UNITED STATES. tion of power and violation of law in the corrupt abuse of appointing, pardoning, and veto powers; in the corrupt interference in elections; and generally in the commission of acts amounting to high crimes and misdemeanors under the Consti UR Record closes on the 3d of December. Congress met in adjourned session on the 21st of November. The most important questions presented have been the matter of the impeachment of the President, and upon the ques-tution.' tion whether the principal of the debt of the United States shall be paid in coin or currency. REPORTS ON IMPEACHMENT. It had been understood that five of the nine members of the Judiciary Committee were opposed to impeachment; but Mr. Churchill, one of this number, changed his ground. On the 25th three reports were presented by the Committee. That of the majority, signed by Messrs. Boutwell, Thomas, Williams, Lawrence, and Churchill, states that the "charges to which their investigation has been directed are usurpa The report goes on to argue at great length that the President has been "guilty of usurpation of power," which involves, of course, a violation of law. The following, greatly abridged, are the specifications embraced in this Majority Report: "The Committee are of opinion that Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, requiring the interposition of the Constitutional power of this House, in that:" (1.) Upon the overthrow of the rebel Government he failed to convene Congress. (2.) On the 25th of May, 1865, he assumed that he had anthority to decide wheth er the Government of North Carolina was republican in form, and that he had the power to guarantee to the people of that State a republícan form of government, "This contest civilization. Incapable of appreciating the great changes which the last six years have wrought, he seeks to measure the great events which surround him by the narrow rules which adjusted public affairs before the rebellion and its legitimate consequences destroyed them and established others. Judge him politically, and condemn him, but the day of political impeachment would be a sad one for the country. Political unfitness and incapacity must be tried at the ballot-box, not in the high court of impeachment." They therefore declare that "the case presented by the testimony and measured by the law, does not declare such high crimes and misdemeanors as require the interposition of the Constitutional power of this House." They therefore ask that the Committee be discharged from the further consideration of the proposed impeachment of the President, and that the subject be laid upon the table. Another Minority Report was presented by Messrs. Eldridge and Marshall. They agree a power which pertains solely to Congress. (3.) He in a great measure to the excited feelings of the recognized a plan of government set up in that State, time. They, however, while acquitting the notwithstanding that Congress refused to recognize it. (4.) He invited conventions in other States lately in President of impeachable crimes, "pronounce rebellion composed in part of well-known traitors. him guilty of many wrongs." (5.) He pardoned large numbers of notorious traitors, with Congress," they say, "has delayed reconwith the design of receiving from them aid in such conventions, so as to constrain Congress to ratify these struction, and inflicted vast injury upon the peounconstitutional proceedings. (6.) He appointed in ple of the rebel States." The President, they several States Provisional Governors, an office un- continue, "has been blind to the necessities of known to the Constitution and laws of the land. (the times and to the demands of a progressive He appointed to these offices notorious traitors. (8.) He directed the Secretary of State to promise payment to such persons. (9.) He directed the Secretary of War to make payment to such persons. (10.) He ap; pointed to offices legally established persons who had been engaged in rebellion. (11.) He used property taken in war for the payment of the expenses of these illegal governments. (12.) He anthorized a levy of taxes for the same purpose. (13.) In his public messages and otherwise he has denied the right of Congress to provide for the pacification, government, and restoration of the rebellious States, asserting his own exclusive right to provide governments therefor. (14.) He has vetoed various bills passed by Congress for the pacification and government of these States upon the ground that these States had been restored by his acts, thus interposing his Constitutional power to prevent the restoration of the Union upon a Constitutional basis. (15.) He has exercised the power of removal from and appointment to office for the purpose of maintaining his usurpation. (16.) He pardoned in West Virginia many persons who had deserted from the Union army, for the purpose of securing their votes. (17.) In his message of June 22, 1866, and in other places, he has attempted to prevent the ratification of an amendment to the Constitution, although this amendment provided for the validity of the public debt of the United States, and invalidated any claim for the payment for emancipated slaves, and of any debt incurred for the purpose of aiding the rebellion. (18.) He has made declarations, official and other-fully with the previous Report in the opinion wise, calculated to impair the credit of the United States. (19.) He has transferred railway property to the amount of many millions of dollars to persons and corporations who had been engaged in the rebellion. (20.) He has directed the transfer of large quantities of railway property belonging to the United States to corporations known to be unable to pay their debts. (21.) He has directed subordinate officers of the Government to postpone the collection of moneys due to the United States. (22.) The interest on certain bonds, of which he was a large holder, was paid by his order in preference to debts due the United States, thus using his office to defraud the people of the United States for his own personal advantage. (23.) He has ordered large amounts of cotton and other abandoned property seized by the United States to be restored to the claimants thereof. (24.) He authorized the use of the army of the United States for the dispersion of a lawful assembly of citizens of Louisiana with the intent to deprive the loyal people of that State of every opportunity to frame a Government republican in form, and with the intent to continue in places of trust and emolument persons who had been engaged in an attempt to overthrow the Government of the United States: "All of which omissions of duty, usurpations of power, violations of his oath of office, of the laws and Constitution of the United States, have retarded the public prosperity, lessened the public revenues, disordered the business and finances of the country, encouraged insubordination in the people of the States recently in rebellion, fostered sentiments of hostility between the different classes of citizens, and kept alive the spirit of rebellion, humiliated the nation, dishonored republican institutions, obstructed the restoration of said States to the Union, and delayed and postponed the peaceful and fraternal reorganization of the Government of the United States." This Majority Report concludes with the following resolution: "Resolved, that Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors." that the facts shown before them do not warrant impeachment. This, they affirm, was the only question for the consideration of the Committee. They therefore wholly dissent from the propriety of the censure upon the President, as being wholly beyond the province of the Committee. "In his Constitutional and legitimate sphere, and in the exercise and conduct of his department,' they say, the President is as free to act as is Congress. While acting within the bounds prescribed by the Constitution, he is no more responsible to Congress than Congress is to him." He was not the President of their choice, and they "differ from him in regard to the policy of many things that he has done, and many more that he has left undone;" but they find no evidence that he was "in any instance controlled by motives other than pure and patriotic. His greatest offense is that he has not been able to follow those who had elected him to his office in their mad assault upon and departure from the Constitutional government of the fathers of the Republic." They approve the various acts of the President in regard to reconstruction, and affirm that he followed out the policy of his predecessor, and acted, moreover, with the sanction and approval of his Cabinet; and yet, while he is arraigned as a criminal, they are recognized as the special favorites of the party for impeachment. "The President," they add, "is gravely arraigned for arraying himself against the loyal people of the country in vetoing the miscalled Reconstruction Acts of Congress, when Congress has itself for these Acts received the most withering and indignant condemnation and rebuke of the entire people, from Maine to California." A Minority Report was presented by Messrs. Wilson (Chairman of the Committee) and Woodbridge, in which they argue at length that none of the charges warrant impeachment. Much of the evidence, they say, is mere hearsay, which could not be used in a trial before the Senate. They specially dissent from the tone and spirit The financial matter which is likely to absorb of the Majority Report, declaring that it is owing most attention of Congress relates to the question FINANCIAL PROPOSITIONS. ence to the Constitution; all rights can be protected by means consistent with the fundamental law; the courts are open, and if their processes were unimpeded crimes could be prevented and punished by the proper judicial authorities. He trusts that "we may all finally concur in a mode of settlement consistent at once with our true intion." He then reiterates his arguments to show that "the States lately in rebellion are still members of the National Union," and have never ceased to be so; and that "the Executive, his predecessor, as well as himself, and the heads of all the Departments, have uniformly acted upon the principle that the Union is not only undissolved, but indissoluble ;" and Congress itself, as well as the Judiciary, have affirmed the same principle. whether the principal of the bonds of the United | long as one is obeyed by all parties, the other States-notably those known as the "Five-Twen- will be preserved, and if one is destroyed both ties," shall be paid in coin or currency. The law must perish together." The President goes on expressly provides that the interest shall be paid to set forth in substance the views and arguments in coin; but is silent as to the principal. It is which he has heretofore expressed. There is no held, upon the one hand, that it was clearly un-necessity, he says, which can now prevent obediderstood when these bonds were issued that they were to be paid in coin; on the other hand, it is claimed that this very silence shows that the principal was to be paid in what should be the legal currency of the country. Several prominent men, among whom are Mr. Pendleton, Mr. Butler, and Mr. Stevens, have in published letters or speeches held that the obligations of Gov-terests, and with our sworn duty to the Constituernment would be fulfilled by paying these bonds in currency. Others, among whom are stated to be Mr. Chase, under whom, as Secretary of the Treasury, the loans were contracted, and Mr. M'Culloch, the present Secretary of the Treasury, hold that the obligation was to pay in coin. The question was introduced into the Senate at the very opening of the session by Mr. Edmonds of Vermont, who offered a joint resolution that, Whereas, the public debt of the United States was (except where specially otherwise provided) contracted and incurred upon the faith and credit of the United States that the same would be paid or redeemed in coin or its equivalent. Therefore, be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, that the public debt of the United States, except in the cases where in the law authorizing the same other provision was expressly made, is owing in coin or its equivalent, and the faith of the United States is hereby pledged in payment accordingly. He The President then "recommends the repeal of the Acts of Congress which place ten of the States under the domination of military masters,' and repeats his objections to these Acts. "has no desire to save from the proper and just punishment of their great crime those who engaged in the rebellion against the Government;" but as a mode of punishment, the measures under consideration are the most unreasonable that could be invented. They punish the innocent as well as the guilty, "confounding them all together in one common doom." Several other financial projects have been introduced into Congress; prominent is one by Senator Morrill. It provides that after the 4th of July, 1869, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay in coin all United States legal-tender notes not bearing interest, as they may be presented. That after January 1, 1869, the Secretary shall in January and July sell all the excess of gold in the Treasury above the amount of $75,000,000. That after July 4, 1869, all National Banks shall be required to pay in coin all their circulating notes of $5 and under, and all of a higher de-tary despotism under which they are now suffernomination in coin or legal-tender notes. The adjourned session came to a close at noon on December 2, and the regular session was at once opened. THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE. The Message opens with the statement that "the continued disorganization of the Union to which the President has so often called the attention of Congress is yet a subject of profound concern." He then goes on to set forth what, in the President's view, is the present condition of the country. The President says that when a civil war has closed it is "the first interest and duty of a state to repair the injuries which war has inflicted, and to secure the benefit of the lessons it teaches as fully and speedily as possible. This duty was promptly accepted, not only by the Executive, but by the insurrectionary States themselves, and the restoration of peace was believed to be easy and certain. But these anticipations were disappointed by legislation from which the President felt constrained to withhold his assent; and at "this time there is no Union as our fathers understood the term, and as they wished us to understand it. The Union and the Constitution are inseparable; as The President discusses at length the question of negro suffrage. "It is," he says, "manifestly and avowedly the object of these laws to confer upon negroes the privilege of voting, and to disfranchise such numbers of white citizens as will give the former a clear majority in the Southern States. But the subjugation of these States to negro domination would be worse than the mili ing; and it was believed beforehand that the people would endure any amount of military oppression for any length of time rather than degrade themselves by subjection to the negro race. The blacks should be humanely governed, and protected in their rights of person and property; but were it now practicable to give them a government exclusively their own, it would be a question whether we ought to do so. But it is proposed that not only shall they govern themselves, but that they shall rule the white race, make and administer the State laws, elect President and Members of Congress, and shape to a greater or less extent the future destiny of the whole country. The President goes on to argue that such a trust would not be safe in their hands. The negro race, he says, has shown less capacity for government than any other; no independent government has ever been successful in their hands; wherever left to themselves, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. In the Southern States, just released from slavery, it is doubtful whether they know more than did their ancestors how to organize and regulate society. Not only are they regardless of the rights of property, but so ignorant are they of public affairs that their voting would be |