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However much fair-minded men may have been wearied with the backing and filling of Congress, and their uncertainty of action on some of the most important questions that have come before them,–however the dignity, and even propriety, of their attitude toward Mr. Johnson may be in some respects honestly called in question,–no one who has looked fairly at the matter can pronounce the terms they have imposed on the South as conditions of restoration harsh ones. The character of Congress is not before the country, but simply the character of the plan they propose. For ourselves, we should frankly express our disgust at the demagogism which courted the Fenians; for, however much we may sympathize with the real wrongs of Ireland, it was not for an American Congress to declare itself in favor of a movement which based itself on the claim of every Irish voter in the country to a double citizenship, in which the adopted country was made secondary, and which, directed as it was against a province where Irishmen are put on equal terms with every other inhabitant, and where their own Church is the privileged one, was nothing better than burglary and murder. Whatever may be Mr. Seward’s faults, he was certainly right in his dealing with that matter, unless he is to be blamed for slowness. But as regards the terms offered by Congress to the South, they are very far from harsh or unreasonable; they are lamb-like compared to what we had reason to fear from Mr. Johnson, if we might judge by his speeches and declarations of a year or two ago. But for the unhappy hallucination which led Mr. Johnson first to fancy himself the people of the United States, and then to quarrel with the party which elected him for not granting that he was so, they would not have found a man in the North to question their justice and propriety, unless among those who from the outset would have been willing to accept Mr. Jefferson Davis as the legitimate President of the whole country. The terms imposed by Congress really demand nothing more than that the South should put in practice at home that Monroe Doctrine of which it has always been so clamorous a supporter when it could be used for party purposes. The system of privileged classes which the South proposes to establish is a relic of old Europe which we think it bad policy to introduce again on this continent, after our so fresh experience in the war of the evil consequences that may spring from it. Aristocracy can form no more intimate and hearty union with democracy under one form than under another; and unless such a union be accomplished, or we can see some reasonable hope of its future accomplishment, we are as far from our object as ever.

The plan proposed disfranchises no one, does not even interfere with the right of the States to settle the conditions of the franchise. It merely asks that the privilege shall be alike within reach of all, attainable on the same terms by those who have shown themselves our friends as by those whose hands were so lately red with the blood of our nearest and dearest. We have nothing to do with the number of actual loyalists at the South, but with the number of possible ones. The question is not how many now exist there, and what are their rights, but how many may be made to exist there, and by what means. The duty of the country to itself transcends all private claims or class interests. And when people speak of “the South,” do they very clearly define to themselves what they mean by the words? Do they not really mean, without knowing it, the small body of dangerous men who have misguided that part of the country to its own ruin, and almost to that of the Republic? In the mind of our government the South should have no such narrow meaning. It should see behind the conspirators of yesterday an innumerable throng of dusky faces, with their dumb appeal, not to its mercy, its generosity, or even its gratitude, but to its plighted faith, to the solemn engagement of its chief magistrate and their martyr. Any theory of the South which leaves out the negro is a scandal and reproach to our honesty; any attempt at another of those fatal compromises which ignore his claims upon us, but cannot ignore his claims upon nature and God and that inevitable future which we may hope to put far from us, but which is even now at our door, would be an imputation on our judgment, and an acknowledgment that we were unworthy to measure our strength with a great occasion when it met us face to face.