Republicans will not be
sufficiently alive to the fact, that divisions on local questions and
candidates will be considered at Washington as significant of a change
in the public mind on the great national question which it is the
business of the Fortieth Congress to settle. That Congress needs the
moral support of a great Republican vote _now_, and will obtain it
provided the people are roused to a conviction of its necessity. But a
large and influential portion of the Republican party is composed of
business men, whose occupations disconnect them from politics except in
important exigencies, and who can with difficulty be made to believe
that politics is a part of their business, as long as the safety of
their business is not threatened by civil disorders. They think the
reconstruction question is practically settled, and when you speak to
them of plots such as are now hatching in Washington, and which seem as
preposterous as the story of a sensational novel, their incredulity
confirms them in the notion that it is safe to allow things to take
their course. Their very good sense makes them blind to the designs of
such a Bobadil-Cromwell as Andrew Johnson. The great body of the
Republican party, indeed, shows at present a little of the exhaustion
which is apt to follow a series of victories, and exhibits altogether
too much of the confidence which so often attends an incompleted
triumph.

The Democratic party, on the contrary, is all alive, and is preparing
for one last desperate attempt to recover its old position in the
nation. Its leaders fear that, if the Congressional plan of
reconstruction be carried out, it will result in republicanizing the
Southern States. This would be the political extinction of their party.
In fighting against that plan, they are, therefore, fighting for life,
and are accordingly more than usually profligate in the character of the
stimulants they address to whatever meanness, baseness, dishonesty,
lawlessness, and ignorance there may be in the nation. Taxation presses
hard on the people, and they have not hesitated to propose repudiation
of the public debt as the means of relief. The argument is addressed to
ignorance and passion, for Mirabeau hit the reason of the case when he
defined repudiation as taxation in its most cruel and iniquitous form.
But the method of repudiation which the Democratic leaders propose to
follow is of all methods the worst and most calamitous. They would make
t