ly all the inhabitants
exterminated. Mr. Johnson's prophetic vision of that Paradise of
constitutionalism, shadowed forth in his exclamation that he would stand
by the Constitution though all around him should perish, would be
measurably realized; and among the ruins of the nation a few haggard and
ragged pedants would be left to drone out eulogies on "the glorious
Constitution" which had survived unharmed the anarchy, poverty, and
depopulation it had produced. An interpretation of the Constitution
which thus makes it the shield of treason and the destroyer of
civilization must be false both to fact and sense. The framers of that
instrument were not idiots; yet idiots they would certainly have been,
if they had put into it a clause declaring "that no State, or
combination of States, which may at any time choose to get up an armed
attempt to overthrow the government established by this Constitution,
and be defeated in the attempt, shall forfeit any of the privileges
granted by this instrument to loyal States." But an interpretation of
the Constitution which can be conceived of as forming a possible part of
it only by impeaching the sanity of its framers, cannot be an
interpretation which the American people are morally bound to risk ruin
to support.

But even if we should be wild enough to admit the Johnsonian principle
respecting insurgent States, the question comes up as to the identity of
the States now demanding representation with the States whose rights of
representation are affirmed to have been only suspended during their
rebellion. The fact would seem to be, that these reconstructed States
are merely the creations of the executive branch of the government, with
every organic bond hopelessly cut which connected them with the old
State governments and constitutions. They have only the names of the
States they pretend to _be_. Before the Rebellion, they had a legal
people; when Mr. Johnson took hold of them, they had nothing but a
disorganized population. Out of this population he by his own will
created a people, on the principle, we must suppose, of natural
selection. Now, to decide who are the people of a State is to create its
very foundations,--to begin anew in the most comprehensive sense of the
word; for the being of a State is more in its people, that is, in the
persons selected from its inhabitants to be the depositaries of its
political power, than it is in its geographical boundaries and area.
Over this