suasive effect of We with the great body of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of his thought as it went along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he was so eminently our representative man, that, when he spoke, it seemed as if the people were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought owed nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement that came of settled purpose and an energy of reason that did not know what rhetoric meant. There was nothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He always addressed the intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their ignorance.

Mr. Johnson is the first of our Presidents who has descended to the stump, and spoken to the people as if they were a mob. We do not care to waste words in criticising the taste of this proceeding, but deem it our duty to comment on some of its graver aspects. We shall leave entirely aside whatever was personal in the extraordinary diatribe of the 22d of February, merely remarking that we believe the majority of Americans have too much good sense to be flattered by an allusion to the humbleness of their chief magistrate's origin; the matter of interest for them being rather to ascertain what he has arrived at than where he started from, we do not mean in station, but in character, intelligence, and fitness for the place he occupies. We have reason to suspect, indeed, that pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature, and that one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. The people do not take it as a compliment to be told that they have chosen a plebeian to the highest office, for they are not fond of a plebeian tone of mind or manners. What they do like, we believe, is to be represented by their foremost man, their highest type of courage, sense, and patriotism, no matter what his origin. For, after all, no one in this country incurs any natal disadvantage except that of being born to an ease which robs him of the necessity of exerting, and so of increasing and maturing, his natural powers. It is of very little consequence to know what our President

was; of the very highest, to ascertain what he is, and to make the best of him. We may say, in passing, that the bearing of Congress, under the temptations of the last few weeks, has been most encouraging, though we must except from our commendation the recent speech of Mr. Stevens of Pennsylvania. There is a pride of patriotism that should make all personal pique seem trifling; and Mr. Stevens ought to have remembered that it was not so much the nakedness of an antagonist that he was uncovering as that of his country.

The dangers of popular oratory are always great, and unhappily ours is nearly all of this kind. Even a speaker in Congress addresses his real hearers through the post-office and the reporters. The merits of the question at issue concern him less than what he shall say about it so as not to ruin his own chance of re-election, and that of some fourth-cousin to a tidewaitership. Few men have any large amount of gathered wisdom, still fewer of extemporary, while there are unhappily many who have a large stock of accumulated phrases, and hold their parts of speech subject to immediate draft. In a country. where the party newspapers and speakers have done their best to make us believe that consistency is of so much more importance than statesmanship, and where every public man is more or less in the habit of considering what he calls his "record " as the one thing to be saved in the general deluge, a hasty speech, if the speaker be in a position to make his words things, may, by this binding force which is superstitiously attributed to the word once uttered, prove to be of public detriment. It would be well for us if we could shake off this baleful system of requiring that a man who has once made a fool of himself shall always thereafter persevere in being one. Unhappily it is something more easy of accomplishment than the final perseverance of the saints. Let us learn to be more careful in distinguishing between betrayal of principle, and breaking loose from a stupid consistency that compels its victims to break their heads against the wall instead of going a few steps round to the door. To eat our own words would seem to bear some analogy to that diet of east-wind which is sometimes attributed to the wild ass, and might therefore be wholesome for the tame variety of that noble and neces

sary animal, which, like the poor, we are sure to have always with us. If the words have been foolish, we can conceive of no food likely to be more nutritious, and could almost wish that we might have public establishments at the common charge, like those at which the Spartans ate black broth, where we might all sit down together to a meal of this cheaply beneficial kind. Among other amendments of the Constitution, since every Senator seems to carry half a dozen in his pocket now-a-days, a sort of legislative six-shooter, might we not have one to the effect that a public character might change his mind as circumstances changed theirs, say once in five years, without forfeiting the confidence of his fellowcitizens?

We trust that Mr. Johnson may not be so often reminded of his late harangue as to be provoked into maintaining it as part of his settled policy, and that every opportunity will be given him for forgetting it, as we are sure his better sense will make him wish to do. For the more we reflect upon it, the more it seems to us to contain, either directly or by implication, principles of very dangerous consequence to the well-being of the Republic. We are by no means disposed to forget Mr. Johnson's loyalty when it was hard to be loyal, nor the many evidences he has given of a sincere desire to accomplish what seemed to him best for the future of the whole country; but, at the same time, we cannot help thinking that some of his over-frank confidences of late have shown alarming misconceptions, both of the position he holds either in the public sentiment or by virtue of his office, and of the duty thereby devolved upon him. We do not mean to indulge ourselves in any nonsensical rhetoric about usurpations like those which cost an English king his head, for we consider the matter in too serious a light, and no crowded galleries invite us to thrill them with Bulwerian commonplace; but we have a conviction that the exceptional circumstances of the last five years, which gave a necessary predominance to the executive part of our government, have left behind them a false impression of the prerogative of a President in ordinary times. The balance-wheel of our system has insensibly come to think itself the motive-power, whereas that, to be

properly effective, should always be generated by the deliberate public opinion of the country. Already the Democratic party, anxious to profit by any chance at resuscitation,- for it is extremely inconvenient to be dead so long, is more than hinting that the right of veto was given to the President that he might bother and baffle a refractory Congress into concession, not to his reasons, but his whim. There seemed to be a plan at one time of forming a President's party, with no principle but that of general opposition to the policy of that great majority which carried him into power. Such a scheme might have had some chance of success in the good old times when it seemed to the people as if there was nothing more important at stake than who should be in and who out; but it would be sure of failure now that the public mind is intelligently made up as to the vital meaning of whatever policy we adopt, and the necessity of establishing our institutions, once for all, on a basis as permanent as human prudence can make it.

Congress is sometimes complained of for wasting time in discussion, and for not having, after a four months' session, arrived at any definite plan of settlement. There has been, perhaps, a little eagerness on the part of honorable members to associate their names with the particular nostrum that is to build up our national system again. In a country where, unhappily, any man may be President, it is natural that a means of advertising so efficacious as this should not be neglected. But really, we do not see how Congress can be blamed for not being ready with a plan definite and precise upon every point of possible application, when it is not yet in possession of the facts according to whose varying complexion the plan must be good or bad. The question with us is much more whether another branch of the government, to which, from its position and its opportunity for a wider view, the country naturally looks for initiative suggestion, and in which a few months ago even decisive action would have been pardoned,-whether this did not let the lucky moment go by without using it. That moment was immediately after Mr. Lincoln's murder, whep the victorious nation was ready to apply, and the conquered faction would have submitted without a murmur to that bold and comprehensive

policy which is the only wise as it is the only safe one for great occasions. To let that moment slip was to descend irrecoverably from the vantage-ground where statesmanship is an exact science, to the experimental level of tentative politics. We cannot often venture to set our own house on fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up to that point of easy forging at which it glowed, longing for the hammer of the master-smith, less than a year ago. That Occasion is swift, we learned long ago from the adage; but this volatility is meant only of moments where force of personal character is decisive, where the fame or fortune of a single man is at stake. The life of nations can afford to take less strict account of time, and in their affairs there may always be a hope that the slow old tortoise, Prudence, may overtake again the opportunity that seemed flown by so irrecoverably. Our people have shown so much of this hardshelled virtue during the last five years, that we look with more of confidence than apprehension to the result of our present difficulties. Never was the common-sense of a nation more often and directly appealed to, never was it readier in coming to its conclusion and making it operative in public affairs, than during the war whose wounds we are now endeavoring to stanch. It is the duty of patriotic men to keep this great popular faculty always in view, to satisfy its natural demand for clearness and practicality in the measures proposed, and not to distract it and render it nugatory by the insubstantial metaphysics of abstract policy. From the splitting of heads to the splitting of hairs would seem to be a long journey, and yet some are already well on their way to the end of it, who should be the leaders of public opinion and not the skirmishing harassers of its march. It would be well if some of our public men would consider that Providence has saved their modesty the trial of an experiment in cosmogony, and that their task is the difficult, no doubt, but much simpler and less ambitious one, of bringing back the confused material which lies ready to their hand, always with a divinely implanted instinct of order in it, to as near an agreement with the providential intention as their best wisdom can discern. The aggregate opinion of a nation moves slowly. Like those old migrations of entire tribes, it is encumbered with much household stuff; a