ts, and be more willing to forego personal rights for his country's
good, than by factious assertion of them to weaken the arm of public
power struggling to save the national existence.

I shall go on in another letter to consider your utterances on the
distinction between the Government and the Administration, and your
special pleas for hostility to the constituted authorities.

LETTER II.

GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION--CONSTITUTIONALITY.

Dear Sir: I now proceed to consider your letter to Mr. Crosby, which I
cannot help regarding as fitted to excite sentiments of mortification as
well as grief in the minds of all intelligent men and good patriots who
in time past have known and honored you. What such as have not known or
cared for you will be apt to think, I shall not undertake to say.

One of Mr. Crosby's questions was this: 'What appears to you the
sufficient reason for a Christian citizen to ally himself with others
for the extreme and radical purpose of undermining and paralyzing the
power of the Government at a crisis when unanimity of support is plainly
essential not only to the welfare but to the very life of the nation?'

This is a plain question, and one may well wonder how it was possible
for you to suppose that you were fairly meeting it and effectually
rebutting the charge it implies by raising the distinction you make
between the Government and the Administration. The sense in which Mr.
Crosby used the word Government is perfectly obvious; and if he had a
right to use it in that sense--as he undoubtedly had--it seems to me it
was for you to answer it in its plain meaning; to answer the question he
asked, and not another, which he did not ask. But you preferred to go
into critical analysis and to make sharp distinctions of words. Let us
look at the work you have made of it.

You tell Mr. Crosby that he has 'fallen into the prevalent error of
confounding the Government with the Administration of the Government,'
and that 'they are not the same.' Now, they _are_ the same, when both
words are used to signify the same thing.

You say that 'the word government has, indeed, two meanings.' Webster
gives a round dozen. In its political applications it has four. You add,
'In order to relieve the subject from ambiguity'--though there is in
this case no ambiguity to relieve--'that the ordinary meaning of
government in free countries is that form of fundamental rules and
principles by which a nation or stat