TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POLICY OF CONFISCATION.
THE establishment of a Confiscation Department at Wash- ington, and the seizure of the Tredegar Iron Works in Virginia, are very serious incidents. Coupled with the Proclamation of Amnesty, and the speech recently made to the Virginian Deputies, they indicate that Mr. Johnson has resolved on an experiment which politically can be justified only by complete success, and which morally can, we fear, scarcely be justified at all. He is about to give the rein to the "Red" theory, which, as we have repeatedly pointed out, underlies all his political utterances—to attempt over a vast area, and amidst a settled population, a radical bouleversement of society, to resettle at once the basis of political power, the sources of social influence, and the distribution of property. Ile is going to employ the old weapon of confiscation against classes as well as individuals, to take away property not as a just punishment for a grave political offence, but as a means of effecting a social revolution, to confiscate not for the benefit of the State which has been assailed, but for that of a class within the State which assisted in the assault. The whole intention of his reply to the Virginians, as of his speeches in Tennessee, is to show that he is acting not as Judge meting out punishment to what the law deems crime, nor yet as King determined to secure obedience, nor even as conqueror resolved to find place for his own soldiery, but as revolutionary leader, determined that society shall be re- organized on the principle of equality, that property as well as power shall pass from the chateau to the cottage, that the influence of wealth shall be uprooted as completely as the influence of caste. He tells his visitors from Virginia with a distinctness which is almost savage that the clause excepting every man with 4,000/. from the benefit of the amnesty was designed, that the wealthy had led the rebellion, that men with more than that sum ought to be taxed to the amount of the surplus "for the benefit of the poor," that if, as they pleaded, they were anxious for their poor neighbours, they had better give them their surplus above 4,000/., and so bring themselves down to the level within which they could claim the benefit of the amnesty. He would read their re- monstrances, but he saw no reason for revoking the ex- emption clause. The Virginians as they retired must have realized for the first time what a Southerner had done for them when he murdered Mr. Lincoln, assassinated the one man in the 'Union who felt as a King, bound to restrain and protect all alike, a ruler essentially constructive, and substi- tuted for him a man with the ideas of Danton, the power of a conqueror, and the legal authority of the elected chief of a mighty State, a ruler essentially destructive. The bitterest abolitionist in the Union could not have chosen out of Maine or Massachusetts a man so certain to pulverize Southern society as this Southerner, whom a Southern assassin has placed at the head of affairs. The retribution is a terrible one, but it is just, and it is out of no sympathy for the planters who led the revolt that we question whether the President's policy is wise, whether he is not attempting a work beyond his strength, setting a precedent from which may flow disorders greater than those which he is endeavour- ing to cure.
We may admit that his action is legal, and himself moved by an idea at once so vast and so unselfish, that in spite of our reason it almost surprises us into a reluctant admiration, The confiscation was decreed by Congress after debate, and not by the military power, and is in itself and when applied to individuals one of the milder penalties for treason. The House of Commons, while anxious last session to abolish forfeiture for felony, as an unequal and therefore unfair addi- tion to the punishments fixed by statute, still desired to retain it as the best and most merciful deterrent against treason. Men risk their lives every day from party feeling or political enthusiasm, but the emotion must be a strong one which tempts them to set their properties on the die, and it is only when it is so strong that insurrection can ever be justifiable. In threatening to apply the law so widely we doubt not there flits before the President's mind the shadow of a great idea, a dream of society re-organized on a free basis, of States filled with a multitude of contented and educated freeholders, of Carolina raised to the level of Massachusetts, and Alabama as prosperous as New York, of the tropical side of the Union turned into a garden as orderly as the colder side, and far richer in varied life and colour, of an accelerated and peace- ful progress for the entire Republic committed to his charge, progress towards the great end, the conversion of a continent boasting all climates and producing all things, into a secure and prosperous home for the refugees of all the races of earth. Such ideas are always the temptations of such men, justify to their consciences measures which, were the result to be prosperity only to themselves, they would regard with suspicion or dislike. Nor are we prepared' to deny that were the change accomplished by the opera- tion of some natural law or the gradual progress of events it might be highly beneficial. Aristocracy under republican forms tends rapidly towards oligarchy,—the one system a monarch always fights,—nor can the institution be ever safe when it rests on a proletariat incapacitated by colour or other social prejudice from rising into its ranks. If the great plantations were subdivided, and the whites placed in moderate farms, and the negroes settled on allotments just, large enough to compel labour after the fashion of the free- countries of Asia, and Northern settlers introduced to lead the way to a better agriculture, society in the South would be much happier and much richer, more peaceful, and with n better chance of developing what ought to be its ideal, the one picture never yet realized on earth, a lofty but indigenous. tropical civilization. That which we doubt is, not the result, but the possibility of securing that result on a sudden, through the will of one strong man acting through means which offend the general instinct of political justice. No man can see enough of the consequence of his own acts, can be certain enough of the ultimate product of the seed he sows, to justify him in setting aside those principles which, though apparently political, have really a moral force, such as equal justice, hear- ing before sentence, and punishment according to guilt, and not according to political benefit. It might be an immense benefit to the world if Pope and Cardinals were all to pass away together, but would mortal man be justified on that- ground in executing them all ?
Cromwell's idea was a grand one when he tried to make of Ireland a new England by pouring in English settlers, ship- ping off the natives to Barbadoes, and depriving all engaged in the revolt of their lands. A new England in the Western Island would have been a great addition to the Empire and a. benefit to the world, and its creation not only seemed possible, but in Macaulay's opinion was almost accomplished, yet we have paid for it in three hundred years of weakness, and ex- penditure, and suffering. The Terrorists had great ideas. when they seized the lands of the imigre's and broke up the aristocracy, and the result of their action has been the con- tinuous revolution of sixty years. France under their rule broke with her past, and has ever since wasted half her energies in seeking to re-cement the links. The Convention had great ideas when it declared itself the armed ally of every suffering people, and succeeded in converting the mild and on the whole progressive, because fearless, monarchies of Europe into suspicious despotisms. Mr. Johnson, if he carries out his own thought to its logical conclusion, will have to do at least as much as the Convention did, to change the whole tenure of property throughout States as large as European kingdoms, to reduce a hundred thousand families to comparative poverty, in order that their aecumu- lations may render it easier for the million to accumulate. Such a course would not be expedient, even if the sole motive were punishment. Modern society has rejected the notion of' punishing whole communities for political offences, of extir- pating races, or ostracizing classes, or levying special taxation upon separate grades of society, as radically unjust. To go back to the old severity and lavishness of penalty, and punish as Philip II. wanted to punish in the Netherlands, and Ferdinand of Austria did punish in Bohemia, to impoverish whole classes without individual inquiry, is to retrograde, to re-commence a practice secretly justified only by the query in which Danton excused the Septembrisers, "Lear sang, clone, halt ii si pur 7" The exemption clause if intended in earnest is proscription, not punishment, a declaration not that rebellion is a crime, but that wealth is an offence. The rebel with more than 4,000/. is to be plundered, in order that the rebel with 2,000/. may go scot free, and that the rebel with nothing may find himself possessed through his rebellion of a compe- tence. This is not retribution, but war to the rich, proclaimed by the ruler of one of earth's richest commu- nities. If it is just to strip a planter of his wealth for the benefit of the poor, why is it not just to strip some of the New Yorkers whose vast incomes have lately been recorded in gazettes for the self-same object ? They are not rebels ? Neither is a man with 4,000/. necessarily more of a rebel than the man with 3,500/. Mr. Jefferson Davis has, it is said, nothing at all left, and never was very rich, but is Mr. Johnson prepared to argue that he is more worthy of amnesty than an average Georgian planter ? How can the lat- ter's dollars be an offence against the State, or an incentive to a resistance by which he will lose so much more than the poor man ? Or if a man with 4,001/. is a guilty man, how is he innocent when he has given the odd pound to the poor ? We strip criminals in England of their property, but then we do not proclaim that if propertiless they are innocent—that poverty is in itself a saving grace which supplies the absence of repentance. The truth is Mr. Johnson is not disquieting himself about the justice of the exception at all, but anxious only to use a law, designed by Congress to enable him to punish, as his instrument for effecting a wide-spread social change. That change may be a necessity, and if it is, of course the political argument against it falls at once to the ground. We acknowledge the right of a nation to save itself by destroy- ing a class, as fully as the right of a surgeon to save life by amputating a limb. But we cannot help believing that had Mr. Lincoln lived he would not have seen the necessity, would have used instead of destroying this immense aristo- cratic force, would have devoted himself to the single task of making freedom real for the planter as well as the mean white, the mean white as well as the negro, and left freedom to produce its results without precipitating them by means which smack of the unscrupulousness as well as of the energy of a revolutionary chief. A maximum for property, above which its possession is penal, is a terrible idea for a legitimate ruler to introduce among nations who have hitherto believed that property is the basis of civilization.
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