e defames and
disregards. His great power is the veto; but the perverse use of this
could easily be checked by the perverse use of many a legislative power
which a mere majority of Congress can effectively use. The fallacy of
the argument of "the President's friends," in their proposition that
Congress should settle the dispute by the easy method of allowing Mr.
Johnson to have his own way, consists in its entire oversight of the
essential character of constitutional government.

And now what would be the consequences of the yielding of Congress in
this struggle? The first effect would be the concession that, in respect
to the most important matter that will probably ever be brought before
the United States government, the executive branch was everything, and
the legislative nothing. The second effect would be, that the Rebel
Slates would re-enter the Union, not only without giving additional
guaranties for their good behavior, but with the elated feeling that
they had gained a great triumph over the "fanatical" North. The third
effect would be the establishment of the principle, that they had never
been out of the Union as States; that, accordingly, a doubt was over the
legality of the legislation which had been transacted in the absence of
their representatives; and that, Congress having, for the past five
years, represented only a section of the country, that section was alone
bound by its measures. The moment it is admitted that the national
legislature, as now constituted, is an incomplete body, and that it
needs Southern "loyal men" to make its laws operative over the South, a
whole brood of deductive reasoners will spring up in that region, eager
to carry the principle out to its remotest logical consequences. After
two or three of those cotton crops on which some persons rely so much to
make the South contented have given it the requisite leisure to follow
long trains of reasoning, it will by degrees convince itself that the
whole national legislation during the war, including the debt and the
Anti-Slavery Amendment, was unconstitutional, and that, as far as it
concerns the Southern States, it is void, and should be of no effect.
Persons who are accustomed to nickname as "radicals" all those statesmen
who do not consider that the removal of an immediate inconvenience
exhausts the whole science of practical politics, are wont to make merry
over this possibility of Southern repudiation, or to look down upon its
fa