March 5.—The good press reduces the activity of the Thirty Seventh Congress to its own rather pigmy-like proportions.
Congress was powerless to purify the corrosive air prevailing in Washington, above all in the various official strata. Congress ardently wished to purify, but the third side of the Congressional triangle, the executive and administrative power, preferred to nurse the foul elements. Such doubtful, and some worse than doubtful officials, undoubtedly will become more bold, expecting the near-at-hand advent of the Copperhead Democratic Millennium.
March 6.—The Copperhead members of both the Houses have been very prolific and scientific about the inferiority of race. Pretty specimens of superiority are they, with their sham, superficial, at hap-hazard gathered, unvaluable small information, with their inveterate prejudices, with their opaque, heavy, unlofty minds! Give to any Africo-American equal chances with these props of darkness, and he very speedily will assert over them an unquestionable superiority. Are not the humble, suffering, orderly contrabands infinitely superior to the rowdy, unruly, ignorant, savage and bloody whites?
Southern papers are filled with accounts of the savage persecutions to which the Union men are exposed in the rebel region. It is the result of what Mr. Seward likes to call his forbearing policy and of the McClellan and Halleck warfare of 1861-62.
March 7.—For the first time in the world's history, for the first time in the history of nations governed and administered by positive, well established, well organised, well defined laws—powers, such as those conferred by Congress on Mr. Lincoln, have been so conferred. Never have such powers been in advance, coolly, legally deliberated, and in advance granted, to any sovereign, as are forced upon Mr. Lincoln by Congress, and forced upon him with the assent of a considerable majority of the people.
Never has a nation or an honest political body whatever, shown to any mortal a confidence similar to that shown to Mr. Lincoln. Never in antiquity, in the days of Athens' and Rome's purest patriotism and civic virtue, has the people invested its best men with a trust so boundless as did the last Congress give to Mr. Lincoln.
The powers granted to a Roman dictator were granted for a short time, and they were extra legal in their nature and character; in their action and execution the dictatorial powers were rather taken than granted in detail. The powers forced on Mr. Lincoln are most minutely specified; they have been most carefully framed and surrounded by all the sacred rites of law, according to justice and the written Constitution. These powers are sanctioned by all formulas constituting the legal cement of a social structure erected by the freest people that ever existed. These powers deliver into Mr. Lincoln's hand all that is dear and sacred to man—his liberty, his domestic hearth, his family, life and fortune. A well and deliberately discussed and matured statute puts all such earthly goods at Mr. Lincoln's disposal and free use.
The sublime axiom, salus populi suprema lex esto again becomes blood and life, and becomes so by the free, deliberate will and decision of the foremost standard-bearer of light and civilization, the first born in the spirit of Christian ethics and of the rights of man.—
The Cromwells, the Napoleons, the absolute kings, the autocrats, and all those whose rule was unlimited and not defined—all such grasped at such powers. They seized them under the pressure of the direst necessity, or to satisfy their personal ambition and exaltation. The French Convention itself exercised unlimited dictatorial powers. But the Convention allowed not these powers to be carried out of the legislative sanctuary. The Committee of Robespierre was a board belonging to and emanating from the Convention; the Commissaries sent to the provinces and to the armies were members of the Convention and represented its unlimited powers. When the Committee of Public Safety wanted a new power to meet a new emergency, the Convention, so to speak, daily adjusted the law and its might to such emergencies.
Will Mr. Lincoln realize the grandeur of this unparallelled trust? Has he a clear comprehension of the sacrifice thus perpetrated by the people? I shudder to think about it and to doubt.