The President has selected the Times' correspondent at Wash- ington
for his political confidant, whO' communicated Mr. John- son's ideas in an able letter to the Times of this day week. On the general tenor of these political confidences we have com- mented elsewhere, but here we may notice also the almost pathetic complaint of the President that " the expedient course " is now taking rank in Congress far above " the constitutional course." The President is as impassioned on the subject as the Jaoobites about our change of dynasty. "There was a time when men considered the Constitution first when they framed laws. Now they occasionally mentioned it in an accidental man- ner. Some one on looking round discovered the Constitution, with much the same sense of astonishment, apparently, which a man who was watching the stars might experience when he discovered a new planet." Is Mr. Johnson speaking of himself? When, standing on the steps of the Governor's house at Nashville, he told the Ten- nessee slaves that they were free by his own fiat as Governor of the State, he himself was tolerably careless about the Constitution,— indeed, as unconstitutional as he could well be, in the interest of the Union. But since, from the Observatory of the White House, he " discovered " the Constitution, he seems to us to have seen nothing else ; even the Union itself has been " occulted " by it.
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