can party would assist for one moment in carrying out this brutal threat, Mr. Boutwell is ample authority for the belief that the Grant leaders are not only insolent enough to utter it, but base enough to execute it, if they ever get a chance.

sures.

It is plain enough what prompts them to these desperate meaWhen the elective franchise was given to the negro they thought they had legalized a sure mode of stuffing the ballot-boxes, and, so sustained, strong government promised to itself a life without end. But in the course of time the negroes ceased to stuff, and some of them began to vote. This was so contrary to all previous calculations that the friends of strong government could not realize it; they thought it must be caused by some mysterious application of physical force. To this day Mr. Boutwell is unable to comprehend the possibility of a free negro voting of his own head against a carpet-bagger who has robbed him, against a Freedman's Bank that has swindled him out of his earnings, or against a scurvy politician who has cheated him by false promises of forty acres and a mule. Therefore, he believes in the chimera of a bulldozer as much as Cotton Mather believed in witchcraft, and swallows as greedily the false and unreasonable evidence which feeds his credulity. He declares in this article that in the Southern States "any number of citizens are as a public policy of communities and states deprived of their civil rights"; that offices are held there, and power wielded, "through proceedings that are systematically tainted with fraud or crimsoned with innocent blood"; that "one vote of a white citizen in South Carolina is, as a fact in government, equal to three in Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois"; that there are persons in Congress who have no right to their seats, "and these persons constitute the majority in both branches." These monstrous outrages upon the known truth admit of one excuse and only one-Mr. Boutwell believed them.

But the sincerity of his belief in these false statements is no excuse for the pretense he makes of honest indignation. That is a sham, and he knows it. He and his collaborateurs in the stronggovernment enterprise (including the strong man himself) have no conscientious objections to false or forced elections. They have no respect whatever for the right of the people to choose their own officers, State or national. The strength for which they laud their chief so extravagantly was never exhibited during his Presidency, except in coercing voters, suppressing true returns, or otherwise defeating the legal expression of the popular will. Mr. Boutwell

is, therefore, in no condition to speak on this subject as an accuser of others; the beam in his own eye disqualifies him to hunt for motes in the eye of his brother. Nor could he do General Grant any good even by showing that elections are now unfairly conducted. We desire, above all things, to have a free poll and a fair count, and we are much afraid that we will be permanently deprived of our right; but we do not look to Grant for redress or remedy. We do not trust the arch-enemy of honest elections to purify the ballot-box; for that would be "casting out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils."

I will make Mr. Boutwell a proposition. If he will name any

kind of violence or intimidation which the Grant faction have not used to prevent a true poll, or any form of fraud which they have not practiced to falsify returns, or any sort of cheating in the count which they have not resorted to, or any species of the crimen false which they have not perpetrated as a means of swindling the majority; if they have not filled the seats of Congress with impostors whose object it was to misrepresent, injure, and degrade the States they pretended to come from; if they did not falsely procure the election of infamous men to every kind of State office, or when defeated put them in possession and maintain them there by force of arms; if they did not in 1876 defeat the known will of the nation by a most stupendous swindle-if Mr. Boutwell can show that these things and others like them were not done at divers times and places, under the auspices and with the approbation of General Grant and those friends of his who are now pushing him for a third election, then I will give up the whole case and promise to vote for his candidate. There! he has a chance to make one vote, without the risk of losing his own; for, if he fails, I will not ask him to vote my ticket: I will merely insist that he shall not hereafter turn up the whites of his eyes and pretend to be wounded in his virtuous soul, when a fugitive carpet-bagger tells him how he had to drop his plunder and fly for his crimes, because negroes were bulldozed at the South.

General Grant's own history and character as a civilian make it certain that those who support him are enemies of free and honest government. These third-termers are not madmen. They have tried Grant, and they know what he is good for. Those acts of deadly hostility to the Constitution which distinguished the period of his Administration they expect him to repeat. Those atrocious corruptions which made it the golden age of the public plunderer they look for again. I affirm that they intend this, not because

they have said so in words, but because, being sane men, they can intend nothing else.

Doubtless he is a strong man-not mentally or morally strongbut plenty strong enough with an army at his back to spurn the restraints of law and break over the Constitution. It took a strong man to make such governors, and judges, and treasurers, and legislators as he made for the States, and to hold them in place by the bayonet; to force elections against the will of the electors, and to inaugurate a President who had been rejected by the people.

One manifestation of his strength has hardly excited so much admiration as it deserves from his followers. During his last term he took from the Treasury, in flat defiance of the Constitution, one hundred thousand dollars in addition to the hundred thousand which was his legal salary. There was a transaction of Cæsar's with the Roman treasury not dissimilar to this-and Cæsar was a strong man; but Grant, more than Cæsar, showed that peculiar contempt of law which by his admirers is supposed to be strength.

Sometimes they tell us that he is not only strong but faithful. Faithful to what? To his own breeches-pocket; to the rich men who made him presents; to the carpet-bag thieves whom he fastened on the Southern States; to the corrupt rings that supported him in the North; to the returning boards who forged election-papers to suit him; to the tools of the vulgar force which thrust his fraud down the throat of the nation-to all these he was faithful enough; but faithful to the Constitution and laws he never was. From beginning to end of his Administration he was treacherous to the most sacred trust that human hands can hold.

This is no railing accusation against General Grant, no harsh construction of his past acts, no detraction from his claim to a certain degree of personal respectability, no proof that as a despot he would not do as well as another. He is a mere soldier, with no knowledge of law and no conception of the purpose for which civil institutions are made. When elected President, he took the Government on his hands as a mere job to be done for the interests of those who employed and paid him, without caring what rights of other persons might suffer. Horace's description of a military chief governing strongly in civil affairs has never in modern times been so perfectly realized:

"Jura negat sibi nata; nihil non arrogat armis."

He did not stop to inquire what was in that Constitution which he swore to preserve, protect, and defend; if he had taken an oath to

destroy it, his hostility would have been neither less nor greater. If there be one provision of the Federal compact more perfectly clear than any of the others, it is that which reserves and secures to the States all sovereign authority, jurisdiction, and powers, except what are specifically enumerated and expressly given to the General Government; but, clear as this is, General Grant never could see it. When a politician came to him (especially if he came with a present in his hand), and told him that the States had no rights, and the doctrine of State sovereignty was mere treason, he believed it firmly and acted accordingly. He himself has furnished conclusive proof that, when he stretched forth his rapacious hand and took from the public Treasury a hundred thousand dollars more than his lawful salary, he had never read or heard about that part of the Constitution which forbids the compensation of a President to be increased "during the term for which he shall have been elected." It probably never struck him that it was bribery to accept money and lands and goods from men whom he immediately afterward appointed to the highest offices in his gift. When to this is

added the proneness of ignorant ambition to that Cæsarean rule of ethics which declares everything right which is done regnandi causa, you have a character dear to the heart of strong government, but utterly unfit to be trusted by a people who desire to be free.

However that may be, all evidence shows that the object of pushing General Grant for a third term is not to give us an honest and legal administration of our public affairs, but to set up some system of absolutism without law, or, as Mr. Stevens said, "outside of the Constitution." What form or title shall it have? If its projectors succeed, will they give us an imperial despotism, open and avowed? Or will they curse us with the heavier and more degrading affliction of a rotten republic?

If my soul could come into their counsels, or mine honor be joined unto their assembly, I would tell them that their success now will bring them hideous ruin in the long-run. For a little while it may increase their fortunes, or swell their personal consequence, and gratify their contemptuous hatred of the States and people under their arbitrary rule. But strong government is a weak contrivance, after all, and never lasts. Its front is of brass, but the feet it stands on are always made of clay. Let those who would identify their interests with Grantism think well how unsafe is the protection they are seeking.

J. S. BLACK.

THE RELIGION OF ALL SENSIBLE MEN.

THERE is, we know, a religion common to all men of sense; though men of sense never say what that religion may be. There may be more reasons than one for their reticence. A man of sense is well aware that he can say what he pleases without shocking the most delicate orthodoxy. He requires no cryptographic art to hide his meaning, for plain letters are ciphers to all who are not men of sense. The average reader is frightened by the use of certain counters, not by the ideas which they symbolize for the understanding. Refrain from dotting your 's and crossing your t's, and your utterance will be for him an insoluble mystery. He would be shocked if you said in plain terms "there is no God"; but it is easy to give quite an orthodox and edifying turn to the sentiment. We have all read defenses of agnosticism, which pass for assaults upon the wicked "deist," and elaborate expositions of downright materialism intended to support Christianity. Men of sense, I fancy, often wish to avoid scandal rather than to conceal their sentiments from their peers. They trust to a freemasonry which exists among themselves, and presents an impenetrable barrier to the sagacity of fools. One may guess that the esoteric creed drops some articles of the orthodox faith; but the man of sense, while he has a contemptuous smile for any one who (as M. Renan says of St. Paul) "believes heavily," or takes all creeds seriously, has a hearty dislike for the man who too openly discards the established tenets. Why drop a veil so easily worn? Religion is, after all, useful; and we are even bound-for the sensible man can take a high moral tone when he pleases to invent the God who does not exist.

But how are we to be guided in these troublesome days, when rash persons have insisted upon revealing the open secret, and the esoteric creed of the sensible man has been proclaimed so that they who run may read? On the whole, the sensible man would reply: