ght to seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives which
New York and Illinois can claim? The question is not whether the
victorious party shall exercise magnanimity and mercy, whether it shall
attempt to heal wounds rather than open them afresh, but whether its
legal representatives, constituting, as it was supposed, the legislative
department of the United States government, shall have anything to do
with the matter at all. The President seems to think they have not; and
finding that Congress, by immense majorities, declined to abdicate its
functions, he and his partisans appealed to such legislative assemblies
as could be extemporized for the occasion. Congress did not fairly
represent the people of the whole Union; and Mr. Johnson accordingly
unfolded his measures to a body which, in his opinion, we must suppose
did, namely, a Copperhead mob which gathered under his windows at
Washington. The Secretary of State addressed a meeting in New York,
assembled in a hall which is the very symbol of mutation. Some
collectors and postmasters have, we believe, been kind enough to take
upon themselves the trouble of calling similar legislative assemblies in
their respective cities; and Keokuk, it is well known, has won deserved
celebrity for the rapidity with which its gathering of publicists passed
the President's plan. Still more important, perhaps, is the unanimity
with which the "James Page Library Company," of Philadelphia, fulfilled
its duty of legislating for the whole republic. This mode of taking the
opinion of the people, if considered merely as an innocent amusement of
great officials, may be harmless; but political farces played by actors
who do not seem to take their own jokes sometimes lead to serious
consequences; and the effect upon the South of suggesting that the
Congress of the United States not only misrepresents its constituents,
but excludes "loyal men" who have a right to seats, cannot but give
fierce additional stimulants to Southern disaffection.

We are accordingly, it would seem, in danger of having a President, who
is at variance with nearly two thirds of Congress, using his whole
executive power and influence against the party he was supposed to
represent, and having on his side the Southerners who made the
Rebellion, the Northerners whose sympathies were on the side of the
Rebellion, a small collection of Republican politicians called "the
President's friends," and the undefined political f