States, except by public officers charged with the custody of convicts by the laws thereof; and that so much of the seventeenth section of the fifth article of the Constitution of the State of Georgia, as gives authority to Legislatures or Courts to repudiate debts contracted prior to the 1st day of June, 1865, and similar provisions in all the other of the Constitutions mentioned in this bill, shall be null and void as against all men who were loyal during the whole time of the rebellion, and who during that time supported the Union, and they shall have the same rights in the courts and elsewhere as if no rebellion had ever existed."

The bill from which we have quoted was carried through the House almost without debate; without effort to procure information as to the nature of these Constitutions, the vote upon them in detail, or their practical workings with reference to the ordinary interests of the communities upon which they were enforced. In many of these Constitutions, apart from the topic of the Negro, were singular excrescences of legislation; and to all of them attached a story of fraud and corruption. A Southern correspondent, treating of these reconstructed Constitutions says: "In South Carolina, Alabama, and Arkansas, the Legislature can keep up standing armies in time of peace, and in North and South Carolina, and Arkansas, children, irrespective of colour, are to be compelled to go to the public schools together, unless privately educated by their parents. In the Mississippi Convention, now [ May 15, 1868] in the 127th day of its session, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars already, there are but five white native Mississippians out of the whole one hundred delegates. In South Carolina, there are sixty-five Negroes in the House and nine in the Senate, and these ignorant creatures, who outnumber the whites on joint ballot, only pay $187 25 taxes, though their majority gives them full power of taxing all the property of the State. Fifty-seven of these Negroes pay

no tax at all, and of the seventy white members thirty-six pay no taxes either, and the balance of them only $368 80; so that the whole South Carolina Legislature only pay $496 65 of the taxes it is to impose."

This budget of curiosities comes in the vehicle of the press. There was no disposition of the Radical party in Congress to ventilate them, or to give any information on a subject on which they proceeded to pass important and historical legislation. Nor was there any explanation afforded even of the condition proposed by Mr. Stevens, invading the relief sections of these Constitutions in reference to debts contracted during the war, and curiously giving pecuniary premiums to Union men. Even this remarkable novelty was passed almost without debate; and all efforts to criticise a body of legislation, so large and various, were peremptorily suppressed.

But it is not of this haste of legislation that we design to complain in this place, or of the customary suppression by an unscrupulous party of all statements of the means by which it obtains its ends. We have referred particularly to this pretended restoration of States to the Union as an insult to the intelligence of the South, and a new provocation to its patience. It is but a farce; a prolongation of the real problem of Reconstruction, which can never be completed, until the Southern States are re-admitted on the terms only of the Constitution, taking their equal and accustomed places in the Union. The intelligence of the South so far from being pleased with these recent proceedings of Congress, described in the extract of legislation we have just quoted, resents them as a deception and snare, Even the New-York Times, an organ, in many respects, of the Radical party in Congress, is forced to confess that it has yet done nothing to justly determine the essential ques

tions of Reconstruction. This journal says: "Has the fundamental condition of the Arkansas bill been wisely determined as a precedent to be followed in admitting other States? Universal suffrage has been made the corner-stone of Reconstruction, but should it be so engrafted upon ten States that their own people shall be deprived of the power to introduce modifications? We say nothing now as to the difficulties inseparable from attempts to render partisan dogmas irreversible. We might ask, how a tradition of the Medes and Persians can become vital in self-governing communities, and how Congress proposes to enforce the condition, if the reconstructed States choose hereafter to disregard it. Viewed from a critical stand-point, the whole subject is so beset with difficulties, constitutional and logical, that we doubt the ability of any man to see his way clearly to the end of the road on which the country has entered. "

Reconstruction, in its just constitutional sense is still far off; it will probably never be accomplished by the present party in power; the whole ground of legislation will have to be traversed again; and the serious question is whether the South may not be hurried to violence, as persecution presses, and relief hangs in the distance.

If that violence does ensue, there will be no question of prudent trials of war, no calculation of armies and material. The South is incapable of the grand duello of the past, but not incapable of the fierce and desultory rebellion of movable columns and raids; incapable of a war of calculation, but not incapable of a war of vengeance. She may repeat on a much larger scale the Fenianism of Ireland, and may even take a lesson from the few Indian tribes which have sufficed to hold a year's campaign against the military power of the United States.

Such vengeful rebellions, spread over the whole space of a country, renewing themselves rather from desperation than hope, and animated by the willingness of a people to die rather than suffer longer, have sometimes, as we are assured by history, been more difficult to quell than regular wars, and have shaken to their foundations governments stronger than that at Washington. Admitted that the South must ultimately go under in such a contest. What of that! There are times when men find their lives intolerable, and will wear them on their sleeves in any tilt at fortune. Let Congress beware of too much experiment on the temper of the South, for a rebellion may yet be kindled there, in which many men will be satisfied to find a funeral pyre, provided it consumes with themselves the structure of a hated and intolerable despotism.

........ But we are not advising the South.-We are simply warning the North. We have stated what is the desperation of the former; but against that desperation we set our faces, and we write in these pages to counsel the true hope of the South. If we have represented an extreme case, it is that the rebound of the argument may be more striking and effective. There is

hope for the South. Our mind has steadily held it in all we have written up to this point. From the condition we have described, of ruin and terrour, we shall presently see emerge Hope, pure and beautiful-like the white star, alba stella, rising after the storms of the day have been spent, and the torn and purple clouds have been gathered at the gates of Evening!

What is the true hope of the South?-The new cause, or the "lost cause revivedAbolition destroyed the barrier of races, the true value of Slavery-The war, as merely developing the ultimate issue of constitutional liberty and of our political traditions "The South Victorious"-The lesson of patience-Pessimists in Congress-B. F. Butler and Thaddeus Stevens-Can the Constitution be recovered ?— Survey of our departure from it-Peculiar conditions for judging American history— An incident of the Philadelphia Convention-The elections of 1867-Power of public opinion in our political system-"White," the winning word-Declaration of Gen. Ewing-Congress translates the political controversy into a war for liberty-Two parties left by the war-The fundamental idea of President Johnson's Adminis. tration-Review of it-Horace Greeley and a New Jersey correspondent-Character of President Johnson-His extraordinary sacrifices of power and patronage-His heroic attitude in Impeachment-A bold and thrilling avowal-Value of his example to the South-The nobility of Hope.

What is that hope of the South, to which we have referred? It is the hope of a new political conflict, in which the South will stand stronger than she ever did before; in which she will find occasion to repeat what were really the most important issues of the war; in which she will have the opportunity to regain her "lost cause. She may have to endure much before she reaches the threshold and fruition of this new controversy; but the conclusion is sure to her. This new cause

-or rather the true question of the war revived-is the supremacy of the white race and along with it and strengthening it, the re-assertion of our political traditions, and the protection of our ancient fabrics of government. This was the ultimate, logical problem of the war, although the people of the South but dimly perceived it. They were the wise men in the South who understood at the beginning, that Slavery was a most unimportant object in the war as a matter of property; that the abolition of Slavery was not to be greatly regretted as such—a small, incomplete event-but it was to be deplored