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Many people are led to favor Mr. Johnson’s policy because they dislike those whom they please to call the “Republican leaders.” If ever a party existed that had no recognized leaders, it is the Republican party. Composed for the last five years, at least, of men who, themselves professing all shades of opinion, were agreed only in a determination to sustain the honor and preserve the existence of the nation, it has been rather a majority than a party, employing the legislative machine to carry out the purposes of public opinion. The people were the true inspirers of all its measures, and accordingly it was left without a definite policy the moment the mere politicians in its ranks became doubtful as to what direction the popular mind would take. It had no recognized leader either in the House or Senate just at the time when it first stood in need of such. The majority of its representatives there tried in vain to cast any political horoscope by which it would be safe for them individually to be guided. They showed the same distrust of the sound judgment of the people and their power to grasp principles that they showed at the beginning of the war, and at every discouraging moment while it was going on. Now that the signs of the times show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is only a calculation of what it would be “safe to go before the people with,” as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing “lodge,” now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian “circle,” they mistake the momentary eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation. Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the next district election? When we consider how noble the science is,–nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God’s purposes toward mankind,–we feel sure that it is to find nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.

There is another class of men who are honestly drawn toward the policy of what we are fain, for want of a more definite name, to call the Presidential Opposition party, by their approval of the lenient measures which they suppose to be peculiar to it. But our objection to the measures advocated by the Philadelphia Convention, so far as we can trace any definite shape amid the dust-cloud of words, is, not they would treat the Rebel States with moderation, but that they propose to take them back on trust. We freely admit that we should have been inclined to see more reasonableness in this course if we had not the examples of Jamaica and New Orleans before our eyes; if we had not seen both there and in other instances with which history supplies us, that it is not safe to leave the settlement of such matters in the hands of men who would be more than human if they had not the prejudices and the resentments of caste. Here is just one of those cases of public concern which call for the arbitrament of a cool and impartial third party,–the very office expected of a popular government,–which should as carefully abstain from meddling in matters that may be safely left to be decided by natural laws as it should be prompt to interfere where those laws would to the general detriment be inoperative. It should be remembered that self-interest, though its requirements may seem plain and imperative to an unprejudiced bystander, is something which men, and even communities, are often ready to sacrifice at the bidding of their passions, and of none so readily as their pride. As for the attachment between master and slave, whose existence is sometimes asseverated in the face of so many glaring facts to the contrary, and on which we are asked to depend as something stronger than written law, we have very little faith in it. The system of clanship in the Scottish Highlands is the strongest case to which we can appeal in modern times of a truly patriarchal social order. In that, the pride of the chief was answered by the willing devotion of the sept, and the two were bound together as closely as kindred blood, immemorial tradition, and mutual dependence could link them; and yet, the moment it became for the interest of the chieftain, in whom alone was the landed title, to convert the mountain slopes into sheep-walks, farewell to all considerations of ancestral legend and ideal picturesqueness! The clansmen were dispossessed of their little holdings, and shipped off to the colonies like cattle, by the very men for whom they would have given their lives without question. The relation, just like that of master and slave, or the proposed one of superior and dependent, in the South, had become an anachronism, to preserve which would have been a vain struggle against that power of Necessity which the Greeks revered as something god-like. In our own case, so far from making it for the interest of the ruling classes at the South to elevate the condition of the black man, the policy of Mr. Johnson offers them a bribe to keep him in a state of hopeless dependency and subjection. It gives them more members of Congress in proportion as they have more unrepresented inhabitants. Mr. Beecher asks us (and we see no possible reason for doubting the honesty of his opinions, whatever may be their soundness) whether we are afraid of the South, and tells us that, if we allow them to govern us, we shall richly deserve it. It is not that we are afraid of, nor are we in the habit of forming our opinions on any such imaginary grounds; but we confess that we are afraid of committing an act of national injustice, of national dishonor, of national breach of faith, and therefore of national unwisdom and weakness. Moderation is an excellent thing; but taking things for granted is not moderation, and there may be such a thing as being immoderate in concession and confidence. Aristotle taught us long ago that true moderation was as far from the too-much of blind passion on the one hand as from that of equally blind lukewarmness on the other. We have an example of wise reconstructive policy in that measure of the Bourbon-restoration ministry, which compensated the returned emigrants for their confiscated estates by a grant from the public treasury. And the measure was wise, for the reason that it enabled the new proprietors and the ousted ones to live as citizens of the same country together without mutual hatred and distrust. We do not propose to compensate the slaveholder for the loss of his chattels, because the cases are not parallel, and because Mr. Johnson no less than we acknowledges the justice and validity of their emancipation. But the situation of the negro is strikingly parallel with that of the new holders of land in France. As they were entitled to security, so he has a right not only to be secured in his freedom, but in the consequences which legitimately flow from it. For it is only so that he can be insured against that feeling of distrust and uncertainty of the future which will prevent him from being profitable to himself, his former master, and the country. If we sought a parallel for Mr. Johnson’s “policy,” we should find it in James II., thinking his prerogative strong enough to overcome the instincts, convictions, and fears of England.