TOPICS OF THE DAY.

MR. JEFFERSON DAVIS AT RICHMOND.

WilTEVER else the struggle between the North and outh teaches us, it ought to teach us above every- thing the moral and political value of a Government that—we cannot say in worth—but in dignity of attitude and bearing does more than represent,—misrepresents by far excelling,— the nation which it governs. For all purposes of external policy, for all purposes of what we may call ideal or imagi- native nationality, the men who wield the government of a nation are the symbols of that nation's character both to itself and to the world. Russia is a country, for instance, full of ignorance, poverty, and barbarity, where millions of the lowest class are still—in character—serfs with all serfs' vices, and hundreds of thousands of the highest are serf-owners with all serf-owners' unscrupulous passions. But Russia not only to the imagination of Europe but to her own, stands for a nation governed by clear-sighted statesmen of courtly diplomatic reticence and prompt purpose, whose intellects are deep and keen and devoted to the external honour of their country- men like Prince Gortschakoff who have defeated with stately irony the combined French and English statesmen, vindicated (successfully though falsely) the wisdom and humanity of their master's conduct, and carried out his ambitious purposes with swift and silent determination. We do not know that this vast intellectual chasm between the Government and the average of the nation does much to improve—in some ways it may do much to lower—its morale. But doubtless it exalts the intellectual standard even of the coarsest political elements it contains, nerves men to vigour, clearness, and self-com- mand, who desire to influence or cope with the present poli- tical organization, and raises the national self-respect of the masses themselves. However false it may be that " vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness," there can be no doubt that a selfish tyranny loses half its relaxing effect on the national mind by losing all its effeminacy and coward- ice. The astringent qualities which remain may be, no doubt usually are, as astringent of the malign passions as they are of the better fortitude of men ;—but they are at least altogether tonic, adding to the strength both of evil and of good, instead of mere laxatives loosening the reins and foment- ing anarchy and rage. One can never compare the average but loose, half-strung Government of the Northern American States, embodied indeed in a man of singular simplicity, lucidity, and intrepidity of mind, but still slow, hesitating, without the precision or dignity of culture, and without the power or the will to draw tight the reins of his own Cabinet,—with the calm, dense, un- wavering, and in some sense ascetic fortitude that guides the evil purposes of the South, without perhaps rather over-appre- ciating this imaginative value of a select rather than a repre- sentative Government. As Mr. Lowell puts it quaintly in one of the newest of his humorous Bigelow papers,- " I tell ye one thing we might lam From them smart critters the Seceders,— Ef bein' right's the fust consarn, The 'fore-the-fust's cast-iron leaders."

And this infinite advantage the South has had from the first in the rule of Mr. Jefferson Davis, a man whose purposes have matured from the vulgar craft and dishonesty of Mississippi repudiation into the true dignity of evil as life went on,—who was the soul of perhaps the most malign, most polished, and most masterly government the North ever had, that nominally of President Pierce, which attempted to force slavery on Kansas, —and who now accepts the responsibility of the world's most deadly civil war with the serene confidence and complacency of one who has all but attained his end of deliberately form- ing the life of a whole nation on a type which even worldly and despotic politicians receive with astonishment, and Christian civilization with indignation and disgust. Yet it is impos- sible to read the account which Mr. Gilmore has recently given us in the Atlantic Monthly of his own and Colonel Jacques's recent interview with the Southern President at Richmond without much of the sort of admiration which we feel for Milton's " Satan," till we are almost thankful to the vulgar Mississippi fraud of Mr. Davis's earlier days for breaking the completeness of the intellectual spell. Mr. Gilmore and Colonel Jacques seem to have gone on one of those fussy fools' errands to which volunteer politicians both North and South are so much addicted,—unless indeed its purpose were indirect, to bring back positive evidence to the North as to the unflinching firmness of the Southern pur- pose, and then Colonel Jacques can scarcely be quite so simple and straightforward as his companion represents him. They had no kind of ' mission' or ' powers' from any one but themselves. But they were " acquainted with the views of the Northern Government and with the sentiments of the Northern people,"' and wished to see if they could not patch up a basis for peace without disunion. Mr. Hawthorne tells us that when American Consul at Liverpool his country- men on their travels always thought it their duty to wait upon him in small committees who chose a chair- man or spokesman on the mat outside his door, on no par- ticular business, but simply to look him up, catechize him, and see generally how he was getting on. The same familiar idea of giving an unexpected lift to their respective Govern- ments appears to prevail among the political volunteers of Richmond and Washington, and it was two of these gentle- men with no better idea in their heads than to request Mr. Jefferson Davis, who seceded because he would not be ruled. by a majority made up from the Free States, to bind him- self to accept the decision of the very majority lie had so cavalierly and at such enormous cost repudiated,—to whose errand we refer. The idea was intrinsically silly, and it was urged with argument so almost ostentatiously feeble that one is half inclined to suspect the finesse of a wish to elicit for the benefit of the North the re-state- ment in the strongest form of the "cast-iron leader's" pur- pose. If that was its object Mr. Davis felt too calm and strong to care to defeat it. He at least was not so short- sighted as to angle with the base Democratic party at the North, by dangling before their eyes baits of a possi- ble re-union on a Pro-Slavery basis, merely for the sake- of breaking up the organization of the Republicans. He knows that sooner or later he must face and conquer, if he is to succeed at all, the whole strength of the Unionist pas- sion of the North, and he is too wise to create a false crisis- by misleading them. Mr. Davis's manner, says Mr. Gilmore,. was "simple, easy, and fascinating." And in fact he was- quite too much possessed with his purpose to feel any annoy- ance at the weak views of his opponents. He sat there quietly in the clear knowledge that through his initiative at least half a million of men have lost their lives ; that that initiative was taken in the deliberate wish to mould a nation into institutions that are essentially incompatible with freedom and popular education ; that for this purpose he has still to supply out of rapidly failing resources the strength of two great armies, to keep up the heart of a weary and ignorant people, and to keep down the heart of one still more weary and ignorant which he retains in servitude ; and that the great struggle, the tide of which for four years has gravitated steadily against him, may easily last at least as many more with constantly dwindling hope for this great project, which almost rests on his own life and that of his great military colleague General Lee. Yet with the clear knowledge of all this he can sit smiling quietly in his bare house at Richmond, saying, " I desire peace as much as you do. I deplore bloodshed as much as you do ; but I feel that not one drop of the blood shed in this war is on my hands; and I look up to my God and say this. I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind ; it would not let us govern ourselves ; and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight his battles, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for inde- pendence, and that or extermination we will have."

Considering that the North never on any occasion inter- fered, or wished to interfere, or were even accused of interfer- ing with the self-government of the South,—that Mr. Davis's efforts "for twelve years" to avert the crisis were all directed to repealing legal and equitable contracts as to the boundary of slavery and forcing the " domestic institution" of the South into the Northern States,—the perfect equanimity with which the Southern President declares that in this matter he has " lived in all good conscience before God " up to this day strikes us as the very sublimity of incarnate purpose, so feed- ing itself on its own intensity as to lose all apprehension of the self-delusions into which it has grown. Nay, Mr. Davis even contemplates the emancipation of the African slaves with perfect composure. Two millions, he says, have been emancipated already by the armies of the North,— it is a remarkable admission,—and he does not much care how soon the rest go. Slavery was the "corner- stone " of the South, said the Vice-President once ; but Mr. Davis implies now that it was rather the type and flower of the national life than essential to its organization. General education, the idea of political equality, the ambition of the masses, all these principles were hostile to slavery, and also essentially hostile to the national type desired by the Southern people; but if the African slaves were removed there would still be the same difference of type dividing them from the North,—still the idea of a labouring class to be kept without knowledge and under subjection,;—so at least we understand the drift of the following between Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Davis :-

Mr. Gilmore—" And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest ?"

Mr. Davis—" No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a moans of bringing other conflicting

.elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, how- ever this war may end, make them two nations."

Mr. Gilmore—" You ask me to say what I think. Will you allow me to say that I know the South pretty well, and never observed those differences ?"

Mr. Davis—" Then you have not used your eyes. My -sight is poorer than yours, but I have seen them for years."

Indeed later in the conversation Mr. Davis makes it clear that he believes the principle of the life of the South to be rule

by a minority,—and evidently he does not mean a select minority representing the whole nation, but a minority ruling by privilege a violent and barbarous majority proud of such rule :— Mr. Davis—" That the majority shall decide it, you mean ? We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again."

Mr. Gilmore—" But the majority must rule finally, either with bullets or ballots."

Mr. Davis —" I am not s) sure of that. Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did

vile. The contrary, I think, is true, Why, Sir, the man who should go before the Southern people with such a pro- position, with any proposition which implied that the North was to have a voice in determining the domestic relations of the South, could not live here a day. He would be hanged to the first tree without judge or jury." We suspect that the North has, and has had all along, but too little wish

to " determine the domestic relations of the South," and that Mr. Davis knows this well. What he means is that

the Southern majority can only be kept under and kept attached to its own subordinate position by being incited to hatred of Northern institutions. He admits freely that in the lifetime of this generation there can be no permanent peace between North and South :—" You have sown such bitter- ness at the South, you have put such an ocean of blood between the two sections, that I despair of seeing any harmony in my time. Our children may forget this war, but we cannot;" and yet he admits it in a context and in a manner which cannot but suggest that this antagonism is rather his

deliberate policy in forming the mind of his nation than 'that inevitable result of war which he calls it. There has been a current of good-natured feeling throughout between both

parties, as there is notoriously between the soldiers of the contending armies, which almost contradicts the spoken words. The conversation is throughout a remarkable one, the re- markable part of it being of course Mr. Davis's. It realizes :almost for the first time how strong and calm a govern- ment may be founded for a moment on one man's clear, patient, evil purpose to enlist the best and noblest parts of a de- graded people's life in the service of their worst institutions and lowest passions, till they themselves have almost learnt to iden- tify ignorant, servile, and cruel habits with patriotism, self-de. Totion, and even martyrdom. Nay, it does more, it realizes how the designer who projects and half accomplishes this, may .almost forget his own former craft and trickiness and intrigue in the superficial grandeur of his bad design, and display in his own character the same strangely inverted strata of cha- racter,—personal heroism, asceticism, fortitude, self-reliance, -equanimity, beneath,—above, the vision of a nation existing for the sake of an oligarchy—a nation kept ignorant that a few may be cultivated, kept poor that a few may be rich, kept brutal that a few may be powerful.