the unconditional right of the Rebel States to
representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question
relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly
these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has
passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever
exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a
distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,--nothing that
President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period,
stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage?
No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe,
disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or
confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt
shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of
all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to
treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States
shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the
presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights,
but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on
voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the
last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection
can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against
Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South
Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters
in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South
should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in
the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal
to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?

Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid,
and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below
the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still
denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals,
bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr
of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union
man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the
Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize
"conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to driv