natical suggesters with the benevolent pity of serenely superior
intelligence; but nobody who has watched the steps by which Calhoun's
logic was inwrought into the substance of the Southern mind,--nobody who
has noted the process by which the justification of one of the bloodiest
rebellions in the history of the world was deduced from the definition
of an abstraction,--nobody who explores the meaning of the phrase,
common in many mouths, that "the South _thought_ itself in the
right,"--will doubt that the seeming bugbear may turn out a dreadful
reality. It is impossible, in fact, for the most far-sighted mind to
predict all the evils which may flow from the heedless adoption of a
vicious principle; if the war has not taught us this, it has taught us
nothing.

But it is not to be supposed that Congress will yield, for to yield
would be to commit suicide. There is not an interest in the nation which
is not concerned in its adherence to the principle, that in it the whole
legislative power of the United States government is vested, and that it
has the right to exact irreversible guaranties of the Rebel States as
the conditions of the admission of their Senators and Representatives.
They are not _in_ the Union until they are in its government; and
Congress has the same power to keep them out that it has to let them in.
By the very nature of the case, the whole question must be left to its
judgment of what is necessary for the public safety and honor. Its
members may be mistaken, but the only method to correct their mistake is
to elect other persons in their places, when their limited period of
service has expired; and any new Congress will, unless it is
scandalously neglectful of the public interests, admit the Rebel States
to their old places in the Union, not because it _must_, but because it
thinks that a sufficient number of guaranties have been obtained to
render their admission prudent and safe. It is in this form that the
subject is coming before the people in the autumn elections; and this
explains the eager haste of the President's friends to forestall and
mislead the public mind, and sacrifice a great party, founded on
principles, to the will of an individual, veering with his moods.

We think, if the vote were taken now, that Congress would be
overwhelmingly sustained by the people. We think this, in spite of such
expressions of the popular will as found vent in the President's meeting
at Washington and Mr. Sewa