art of the Constitution
would be, in Mr. Shellabarger's vivid illustration, to allow "that Lee's
vote should have double the elective power of Grant's; Semmes's double
that of Farragut's; _Booth's--did he live--double that of Lincoln's, his
victim!_"

It is also to be considered that these thirty votes would, in almost all
future sessions of Congress, decide the fate of the most important
measures. In 1862 the Republicans, as Congress is now constituted, only
had a majority of twenty votes. In alliance with the Northern Democratic
party, the South with these thirty votes might repeal the Civil Rights
Bill, the principle of which is embodied in the proposed amendment. It
might assume the Rebel debt, which is repudiated in that amendment. It
might even repudiate the Federal debt, which is affirmed in that
amendment. We are so accustomed to look at the Rebel debt as dead beyond
all power of resurrection, as to forget that it amounts, with the
valuation of the emancipated slaves, to some four thousand millions of
dollars. If the South and its Northern Democratic allies should come
into power, there is a strong probability that a measure would be
brought in to assume at least a portion of this debt,--say two thousand
millions. The Southern members would be nearly a unit for assumption,
and the Northern Democratic members would certainly be exposed to the
most frightful temptation that legislators ever had to resist. Suppose
it were necessary to buy fifty members at a million of dollars apiece,
that sum would only be two and a half per cent of the whole. Suppose it
were necessary to give them ten millions apiece, even that would only be
a deduction of twenty-five per cent from a claim worthless without their
votes. The bribery might be conducted in such a way as to elude
discovery, if not suspicion, and the measure would certainly be
trumpeted all over the North as the grandest of all acts of
statesmanlike "conciliation," binding the South to the Union in
indissoluble bonds of interest. The amendment renders the conversion of
the Rebel debt into the most enormous of all corruption funds an
impossibility.

But the character and necessity of the amendment are too well understood
to need explanation, enforcement, or defence. If it, or some more
stringent one, be not adopted, the loyal people will be tricked out of
the fruits of the war they have waged at the expense of such unexampled
sacrifices of treasure and blood. It never