seemed neither just nor expedient to
permit such an increase of power, unless the class on whose enumeration
it was based were made _bona fide_ citizens, and sharers in this power.
If under this amendment the Southern States should choose to give the
vote to the freedmen, their total representation in Congress would be
raised from sixty-one to seventy. If they did not give it, their
representation would fall to forty-five. There was thus offered them a
strong inducement to establish impartial suffrage; while yet they were
at full liberty to withhold it at the price of some diminution of power
compared with communities adopting the broader principle. The
reconstruction committee had listened to prominent Southerners as to the
probable reception of this provision. Stephens thought his people would
consider it less than their due and would not ratify it. But Lee thought
that Virginia would accept it, and then decide the question of suffrage
according to her preponderating interest; that at present she would
prefer the smaller representation, but would hold herself ready to
extend the suffrage if at any time the freedmen should show a capacity
to vote properly and understandingly.

So far, the Fourteenth Amendment seems now to embody a sound
statesmanship. But the remaining article must be judged by itself. It
excludes from all State and national offices all those, who, having
taken an official oath to support the Constitution, have afterward taken
part in insurrection and rebellion. This was ingeniously framed with an
appearance of justice, as if debarring from office only those who to
rebellion had added perjury. But, as a matter of ethics, the breaking of
official oaths is an inevitable incident of every revolution; and just
as war is held to suspend in a measure the command "thou shalt not
kill," so revolution must be held to cancel the obligation of official
oaths. The opposite view would affix the full guilt of perjury to many
leaders in the American Revolution, perhaps to Washington himself. It
was not really as perjurers that the excluded class were debarred from
office, but as prominent leaders in the rebellion, so marked by having
previously held office. It shut out, and was so intended, a class not
only very large in numbers but including the best intelligence and
social leadership of the South. To exclude these men from all political
leadership in the new regime was in flat defiance of that statesmanship,
as wi