Aware how slowly such a conspiracy as that of the South surrenders the hope of success, it was the Republicans' duty to keep alive at white heat this lesson and vigilance born of the war and the years that preceded it. Instead of this they have, on system, sought to dull those impressions and preach forgetfulness, while constantly lowering party feeling and purpose by personal squabbles and debates on trifles. One by one the men of convictions passed away, leaving ambitious intriguers in their seats.

Meanwhile, these are confronted by a party of convictionsthe South-false and devilish convictions, but still earnest ones. The Republicans hold to-day the same relation to the rehabilitated South that the Whigs did to Free-Soilers in 1849. There were only two distinct points in the moral heavens of 1849: one was Calhoun, the other was Garrison. Clay and Webster shirked Calhoun, not daring to face him. Garrison met him squarely, face to face; and, when Wade and Sumner entered the Senate in 1851, the wires of Calhounism and Garrisonism were joined and the war began.

The South rules to-day in Congress rightfully. In the longrun brains rule, but in critical moments courage rules. Though the North is the abler section, the South has the courage of conviction, and, lion-like, never waits to count the sheep. What the South will finally do with her victory possibly even Southern men themselves do not now know. She waits on events. It is fair to confess that she has more than courage. She has the wit to see and quickness to seize opportunities. She never mistakes her men. She knew Andrew Johnson, and reached him by assassination. He was a character easy of explanation. Poverty and birthplace, race and the giddiness begot by success, fully explain him. But Hayes, the gift Northern blundering has made to the South, is a phenomenon hard to explain. No ordinary amount of folly or wickedness will account for him, and he is of too narrow capacity to justify us in attributing his course to any large design. But, sphinx or otherwise, he has served to hold the stirrup for the South to vault into the saddle.

The first step in her plan and progress is clear enough. The negro enfranchised has added largely to her political strength. With Hayes's aid she has practically disfranchised the negro, and now the white aristocracy wields this whole increased power;

this she knows and feels. The insolent speech which Senator Gordon lately flung at Boston dough-faces, if read between the lines, frankly confesses this. Place that beside the letter from Mr. Jefferson Davis, read at the Macon celebration, and the two reveal clearly the unchanged determination of the South to rule, as heretofore, by an oligarchy built up within the Union, or secure outside of it.

But the keenest suffering at the South to-day does not come from the chagrin of defeated hopes. It is real, naked, pitiable poverty, which presses on classes once wealthy. Her first effort, the first use of her new power, will be to draw money to her section. There is a superfluous article in the Constitution which forbids the payment of the Confederate debt. There will be no such attempt. That debt is mostly held abroad. The South is never anxious to pay any debts, least of all debts due to other nations or communities. But she will bend all her energies to secure payment of claims which directly enrich her own citizens. To create such and fasten them on the national Treasury will be her first effort. That Confederate soldiers will soon receive the same pensions as our own veterans seems a foregone conclusion.

The vast amount of Southern claims, in different forms, now registered at Washington, is the first line of this assault. Whether Republican or Democrat rules, these claims will, most of them, be paid, unless they promptly rouse such indignation and provoke such resistance at the North as do not seem now likely to arise. The effect of more than doubling the national debt any one can calculate. One good result would probably follow. The South, then interested equally with the North in the national indebtedness, would frown on any mad counsel of repudiation from her own quarter, and resist such from the North, if, maddened by this unjust burden, any Northern party should propose interference in any way with the public debt.

Mr. Potter's plan of investigation no doubt contemplates an attempt to put Tilden into the Executive chair. There is ample reason for the movement on the part of Mr. Tilden's friends, He may well doubt his chance of succeeding Mr. Hayes. The next President will be obliged to stand on a soft-money platform. Though Mr. Tilden would be ready to do that, to secure the presidency, the clique which supports him and makes his strength

could not be so transferred. If Mr. Tilden is ever to be President, his only chance seems to be that of filling the rest of Mr. Hayes's term. Besides, to wield the Executive patronage for the remaining half of that term would insure a Democratic succession. There are now three chances out of four of such a succession. But, while the slip and lip remain so proverbially connected, it is well to take a bond of fate, and run no risks.

Whatever be the result of Mr. Potter's investigation, his victory shows that the prudent men of the South are driven headlong, incapable of the least resistance, to dangerous courses by the worst elements of the Northern Democracy and by their own mad followers at home. The pretty speeches of Lamar and Gordon, even if not absolute hypocrisy, are only drops of rose-water flung on the mad surface of Southern hate. What was Stephens's protest, or Lamar's opinion on the Silver Bill, or Gordon's on resumption, when their constituents growled dissent? Mere chips on Niagara. Mr. Potter's success shows that when once in the saddle the old Bourbon South will rule, and either warp the nation to her reactionary mood, or drive the North off by provoking her to secede. If the Southern leaders can manage their followers, they will never again leave the Union. To rule inside of it with such rigor, or wrench it to such injustice as will place the North under their feet, or drive it out-this is the lesson learned at Appomattox.

The South will never again voluntarily take up arms against the Union. But Mr. Potter's success reveals that, nevertheless, such madness is within the possible future. This constitutes the real value of the transaction, the revelation it makes of the condition of the solid South; its continued vassalage to the reckless and dangerous class, which, in 1861, dragged a timid and reluctant aristocracy, and their footstool-the Northern Democrat -into rebellion. At any moment another gun fired at Sumter may plunge the nation into war.

It is waste of time to point us to the words of Southern men. With every affirmation in their history falsified, every pledge deliberately broken, how can the most partial friend of the South ask any man to put faith to-day in the statement or promise of Southern white men? Their whole civil life has been a transparent hypocrisy. The words justice, order, equality, toleration,

liberty, are not used by them in the sense in which the civilized world accepts them. Even Calhoun, on every subject except slavery one of the most pure, sincere, and honest of our statesmen, the moment he spoke of the negro, stooped to equivocate and falsify. The gross mistakes and intentional misstatements of the census of 1840 had been brought to his notice, both officially and otherwise; yet, with shameless effrontery, he paraded them in an official document, meant for European eyes, as well-established and acknowledged facts.

No matter with what oath of loyalty you bind the South, experience warns the most sanguine optimist that no thoughtful man can feel sure that one flag will rule this belt of the continent fifty years hence. Any man who desires that it should must seek to gain time. In time the elements of modern civilization -wealth, industry, toleration, order, law, education, manners, sense of honor, and habit of speaking the truth-will invade and slowly permeate the barbarism of the South, remodeling her into conformity to the nineteenth century. If rash and revolutionary attempts can be postponed long enough, there is a fair chance that the States east of the Mississippi may remain for another century one nation.

It

The guarantee of the Union was the presence in the South of six million blacks with their million votes. They were the natural, hearty, and inalienable allies of the North and the Union. In their presence there God gave us an indestructible defense and permanent guarantee of the Union. They needed no argument and no appeal. Centuries of oppression had taught them where their safety lay. Fairly treated and recognized, they would have been a bulwark against which Southern plot and violence would have alike harmlessly broken for a century to come. did not seem possible that any folly could be so gross as to sacrifice such an alliance. They have clung to the Republican party, in the face of starvation and death, as no other class could have done. Taught by long experience that their old masters were inevitably hypocrites whenever and wherever the black man was concerned, grateful to the Union for liberty, they have refused to believe the duplicity of the Republican party, or see its pitiable weakness. But human nature must, in the long-run, sink to the control of self-interest. It ought to be no surprise if soon the

negro, poor, landless, and deserted by the North, should see how weak he is by the side of the white race near by. Then one portion, terrified and in despair, will stay away from the polls; another, needing bread, or blinded, as half the North is, and the other half pretends to be, by Southern profession, will swell the Democratic vote. If the Union lasts, the negro will be its savior and cement. If the Union is broken, posterity will never cease to wonder at the incredible folly which flung away and alienated its only and natural ally.

While the Republican party has allowed the Southern question to fall into abeyance, it is confronted by another issue, which it has not had statesmanship enough either to conciliate or to use. This is finance. It is not too much to say that the question which most keenly interests three men out of five, and possibly three men out of four, is finance. On this the South and West are natural allies and closely wedded: the ruling class at the South is wretchedly poor, and her first interest is how to get relief; the West lacks capital to open her hidden resources. This she can get only from the East at ruinous rates of interest. This bondage she seeks to break. The Southern question, which held right and wrong in its grasp, appealing to the manhood and rousing the enthusiasm of men, properly treated, might have delayed this material question for some years. The moment men, supposed to be statesmen, proclaimed that lofty hour ended, the mass naturally sunk to the care of their material interests. When Senators and journals ridiculed the "Bloody Shirt," they laughed their power away, as Cervantes did the manhood of Spain.

Common prudence would have been quick to seize this new weapon of finance. Henry Wilson's keen eye, careful only for success, confessed this, the summer before he died. Speaking of the first issue joined on finance, in the Ohio election of 1875, when the Democratic party seized this question, he said to us: "It is a great mistake; we should have started the greenback cry; how ruinous to let the Democrats get ahead of us!" If wise counsels had prevailed, this issue might for some time have been delayed. But, once afoot, it will crowd all others out.

The Democratic party, which is only the South's servant, or the South itself in another dress, has taken eager possession of it. The speed with which the leaders surrender the old dogmas