THE DEAD-LOCK IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.
IT is a somewhat humiliating spectacle to see the American people applying all their great political faculty to the hope- less problem of getting a somewhat complicated key to fit a very simple lock, for which it was never intended. The rival Legislatures in South Carolina, sitting with rival speakers in the same House, the orators on each side using their pistols to give force to their perorations, or using their perorations to spread the fame of their pistols, form only the culminating point in that overwhelming practical proof that a false system has been applied to the Government of the South since the Civil war closed, which the whole condition of the character- istically Southern States really furnishes. We sincerely respect the feeling—though it was in some respects a superstitious feeling—which induced the North to put the only conceivable political weapon by which the negroes could possibly defend themselves against their former masters into the hands of the emancipated slaves, rather than govern the South uncon- stitutionally for a time by military authority and military occupation. The motive was in great measure a profound but misapplied faith in the merits of political self-government, though the materials for political self-government did not exist ; and in some measure also, a generous disinclination to treat the States which had so long been sisters in the Union, as if they belonged to a lower grade of civilisation. These motives were noble in themselves, but they were misapplied when, they led the Republican party in the North to arm the Negroes with the franchise, and then leave them to fight out the battle for themselves with their , farmer masters. We see the result in a Presidential election, in which hardly a single State that is really a Southern State has not been the scene of violence and fraud which should vitiate the election altogether. Nor would it have answered the purpose any better—to give the negroes the franchise, but to have required a high educational qualification for the political representatives chosen ; that would only have had the effect of throwing the negroes into the power of crafty and design- ing whites, with plenty of education and no principle. The simple truth is that to exercise the franchise decently needs a considerable though not a, very elaborate political educa- tion, and that it is as dangerous and as mischievous- to give the franchise wholesale to such a class as the eman- cipated negroes of the South, as it would be to arm little boys and girls wholesale with revolvers and cutlasses. The North could not have abandoned at the peace the negroes whom they emancipated, but in fact the only proper way of securing them their social freedom was to put an impartial government over their beads and the heads of their former frmasters, and to dispense for a time with the inapplicable ex- pedient of Constitutional government. When society had settled down into a condition of social equilibrium, when a sound education law had produced its natural results, by bringing forward a generation of negroes with some know-- ledge, and more sobriety and self-respect, when a certain amount of mutual forbearance between the coloured men and the whites had begun to be the rule instead of the exception— then it would have been time to introduce cautiously and gradually the experiment of self-government, and to prepare for the complete restoration of constitutional equality between the two groups of States. .&s it is, the American Union is involved in much such perplexities as would result in case we suddenly granted a Constitution to the Gold Coast, and asked the Fantees and the Engliah settlers to choose their own Governor by universal suffrage, We are quite aware that while there is no conceivable motive pressing upon us to commit so wild a blunder, there was pressure of the most urgent kind constraining the North not to de- clare the seceded States incapable of self-government for a long interval. And no one who understands the exigencies of political life at the North will wonder that no leading statesman had the courage to advocate a solution which would have been at once held unjust amongst the common-place Republicans, and branded as odious in the highest degree among the commonplace Democrats. But none the less, the elystallisation of society in the South, after the great act of emancipation, has been sacrificed to the exigencies of a policy of which it was the first condi- tion that it should seem fair to a people indoctrinated equally with those two not always very consistent prin- ciples,—the political equality of all men, and the con- stitutional equality of the States constituting the American. Union.
As matters stand, however, probably the only way. out of the difficulty is to make the most of that constitutional princi- ple which combines the authority of that sacred document the Constitution—with the only clear recognition that the Constitution itself in the separate States may some-. times give way. Article iv., section 4, declares that " the United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of Government," and " on application of the Legislature or the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.'' It is under this section that General Grant is now acting in South Carolina, and if it should happen that General Grant is succeeded by a Presi- dent in whom the South places a certain amount of con- fidence, but who is nevertheless animated by Northern ideas of discipline and order, it might be possible under that section to do a good deal towards putting an end to the reign of anarchy, without endangering in. any degree a return to, the iniquities of caste-ascendancy. That is the only clause in the Constitution which appears to contemplate what in the South has actually happened, the temporary unfitness of the Con- stitution for the people ; 'and though when put in force by the Republicans this clause has appeared only to in- crease the violence of mutual recrimination, it might, if judiciously enforced by a wise democrat, provide the means for something about as near to the true solution,, —a scientific military interregnum,—aa the conditions of- political life in the United States at prevent appear to. admit of.
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