Indeed, in the Proclamation of Amnesty, Mr. Johnson practically claims that his power to grant pardons extends to a dispensing power over the laws. But it is evident that the Constitution, in giving the President the power to pardon criminals, does not give him the power to dispense with the laws against crime. At one period, Mr. Johnson seems to have done this in respect to the crime of counterfeiting, by his repeated pardons extended to convicted counterfeiters.—Still there is a broad line of distinction between the abuse of this power to pardon criminals after conviction, and the assumption of power to restore to whole classes of traitors and public enemies their forfeited rights of citizenship. By the pardon of murderers and counterfeiters, the President cannot much increase the number of his political supporters; by the pardon of traitors and public enemies, he may build up a party to support him in his struggle against the legislative department of the government. The reasons which have induced Mr. Johnson to dispense with the laws against treason are political reasons, and bear no relation to his prerogative of mercy. Nobody pretends that he pardoned counterfeiters because they were his political partisans; everybody knows he pardons traitors and public enemies in order to gain their influence and votes. A public enemy himself, and leagued with public enemies, he has the impudence to claim that he is constitutionally capable of perverting his power to pardon into a power to gain political support in his schemes against the loyal nation.
But it is not probable that the President will limit his usurpations to a measure whose chief significance consists in its preliminary character. Before Congress meets in November, he will doubtless have followed it up by others which will make his impeachment a matter of certainty. The only method of preventing him from resisting impeachment by force, is an awakening of the people to the fact that the final battle against reviving rebellion is yet to be fought at the polls. Any apathy or divisions among Republicans in the State elections in October and November, resulting in a decrease of their vote, will embolden Mr. Johnson to venture his meditated coup d'état. He never will submit to be impeached and removed from office unless Congress is sustained by a majority of the people so great as to frighten him into submission. Elated by a little victory, he can only be depressed by a ruinous defeat; and such a defeat it is the solemn duty of the people to prepare for him. Even into his conceited brain must be driven the idea that his contemplated enterprise is hopeless, and that, in attempting to commit the greatest of political crimes, he would succeed only in committing the most enormous of political blunders.
Still, it is not to be concealed that there are circumstances in the present political condition of the country which may give the President just that degree of apparent popular support which is all he needs to stimulate him into open rebellion against the laws. It is, of course, his duty to recognize the people of the United States in their representatives in the Fortieth Congress; but, on the other hand, it is the character of his mind to regard the people as multiplied duplicates of himself, and a mob yelling for "Andy" under his windows is to him more representative of the people than the delegates of twenty States. In the autumn elections only two Representatives to Congress will be chosen; the political strife will relate generally to local questions and candidates; and it is to be feared that the Republicans will not be sufficiently alive to the fact, that divisions on local questions and candidates will be considered at Washington as significant of a change in the public mind on the great national question which it is the business of the Fortieth Congress to settle. That Congress needs the moral support of a great Republican vote now, and will obtain it provided the people are roused to a conviction of its necessity. But a large and influential portion of the Republican party is composed of business men, whose occupations disconnect them from politics except in important exigencies, and who can with difficulty be made to believe that politics is a part of their business, as long as the safety of their business is not threatened by civil disorders. They think the reconstruction question is practically settled, and when you speak to them of plots such as are now hatching in Washington, and which seem as preposterous as the story of a sensational novel, their incredulity confirms them in the notion that it is safe to allow things to take their course. Their very good sense makes them blind to the designs of such a Bobadil-Cromwell as Andrew Johnson. The great body of the Republican party, indeed, shows at present a little of the exhaustion which is apt to follow a series of victories, and exhibits altogether too much of the confidence which so often attends an incompleted triumph.
The Democratic party, on the contrary, is all alive, and is preparing for one last desperate attempt to recover its old position in the nation. Its leaders fear that, if the Congressional plan of reconstruction be carried out, it will result in republicanizing the Southern States. This would be the political extinction of their party. In fighting against that plan, they are, therefore, fighting for life, and are accordingly more than usually profligate in the character of the stimulants they address to whatever meanness, baseness, dishonesty, lawlessness, and ignorance there may be in the nation. Taxation presses hard on the people, and they have not hesitated to propose repudiation of the public debt as the means of relief. The argument is addressed to ignorance and passion, for Mirabeau hit the reason of the case when he defined repudiation as taxation in its most cruel and iniquitous form. But the method of repudiation which the Democratic leaders propose to follow is of all methods the worst and most calamitous. They would make the dollar a mere form of expression by the issue of an additional billion or two of greenbacks, and then "pay off" the debt in the currency they had done all they could to render worthless. In other words they would not only swindle the public creditor, but wreck all values. A party which advocates such a scheme as this, to save it from the death it deserves, would have no hesitation in risking a civil convulsion for the same purpose. Indeed, the reopening of the civil war would not produce half the misery which would be created by the adoption of their project to dilute the currency.
Now, if by apathy on the part of Republicans and audacity on the part of Democrats the autumn elections result unfavorably, it will then be universally seen how true was Senator Sumner's remark made in January last, that "Andrew Johnson, who came to supreme power by a bloody accident, has become the successor of Jefferson Davis in the spirit by which he is governed, and in the mischief he is inflicting on the country"; that "the President of the Rebellion is revived in the President of the United States." What this man now proposes to do has been impressively stated by Senator Thayer of Nebraska, in a public address at Cincinnati: "I declare," he said, "upon my responsibility as a Senator of the United States, that to-day Andrew Johnson meditates and designs forcible resistance to the authority of Congress. I make this statement deliberately, having received it from an unquestioned and unquestionable authority." It would seem that this authority could be none other than the authority of the Acting Secretary of War and General of the Army of the United States, who, reticent as he is, does not pretend to withhold his opinion that the country is in imminent peril, and in peril from the action of the President. But it is by some considered a sufficient reply to such statements, that, if Mr. Johnson should overturn the legislative department of the government, there would be an uprising of the people which would soon sweep him and his supporters from the face of the earth. This may be very true, but we should prefer a less Mexican manner of ascertaining public sentiment. Without leaving their peaceful occupations, the people can do by their votes all that it is proposed they shall do by their muskets. It is hardly necessary that a million or half a million of men should go to Washington to speak their mind to Mr. Johnson, when a ballot-box close at hand will save them the expense and trouble. It will, indeed, be infinitely disgraceful to the nation if Mr. Johnson dares to put his purpose into act, for his courage to violate his own duty will come from the neglect of the people to perform theirs. Let the great uprising of the citizens of the Republic be at the polls this autumn, and there will be no need of a fight in the winter. The House of Representatives, which has the sole power of impeachment, will in all probability impeach the President. The Senate, which has the sole power to try impeachments, will in all probability find him guilty, by the requisite two thirds of its members, of the charges preferred by the House. And he himself, cowed by the popular verdict against his contemplated crime, and hopeless of escaping from the punishment of past delinquencies by a new act of treason, will submit to be removed from the office he has too long been allowed to dishonor.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
The New Life of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
In "The New Life" Dante tells how first he met Beatrice and loved her; but how he feigned that it was another lady he loved, making a defence of her and others still that his real passion might not be known; how Beatrice would not salute him, believing him false and inconstant with these ladies, her friends; how being at a banquet where she was, he was so visibly stricken with love that some of the ladies derided him; how Beatrice's father died, and how Dante himself fell ill; how Beatrice quitted the city, and soon after the world; and how Dante was so grateful to another lady who pitied his affliction that his heart turned toward her in love, but he restrained it, and remained true to Beatrice forever. Part of this is told as the experience of children in years, Dante being nine at the time he first sees his love, and she of "a very youthful age"; but the narrative then extends over the course of sixteen years. The incidents of the slight history furnish occasion for sonnets and canzonets, which often repeat the facts and sentiments of the prose, and which are again elaborately expounded.
Such is "The New Life,"—a medley of passionate feeling, of vaguest narrative, of scholastic pedantry. It is readily conceivable that to transfer such a work to another tongue with verbal truth, and without lapse from the peculiar spirit of the original, is a labor of great and unusual difficulty. The slightest awkwardness in the translation of these mystical passages of prose and rhyme connected by a thread of fact so fragile and so subtle that we must seem to have done it violence in touching it, would be almost fatal to the reader's enjoyment, or even patience. Their version demands deep knowledge, not only of the language in which they first took form, but of all the civil and intellectual conditions of the time and country in which they were produced, as well as the utmost fidelity, and exquisite delicacy of taste. It appears to us that Mr. Norton has met these requirements, and executed his task with signal grace and success.