TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE.
ADRY, shrewd tenacity has always been the characteristic of Mr. Lincoln's Messages, and the one transmitted to Congress on 6th December, is drier, shrewder, and more tenacious than ever. His re-election, while it has not taught him to write eloquently or to conceal the process of slow thinking so visible between the lines of all his compositions, has made him a little more confident in the success of his own views, a little less apprehensive lest there should be any fatal divergence between the will of the electors and his own. This time the people is not quite so absolutely master as it was last year. Then its decree was apparently considered equal to a moral law, now the President, though he has not emanci- pated his judgment, has at least regained the control of his own conscience. "It is the people who in the end must decide," he said only a year ago, but this time, "If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re.enelave the enfranchised, another, not I, must be their instrument to propose it." "I," one per- ceives, have divined that in this matter of slavery there is a law higher than the will of the people, which "I," at the cost of dethronement or otherwise, intend henceforth to obey. Two years more of power and Mr. Lincoln will probably an- nounce what he already dimly perceives, that the place of rulers is in the front, that it is his duty to lead, and not merely to follow, and that the essence of self-government is the right of changing guides, not of declaring that the mass will rush on leaderless. Already he has stepped out of the crowd enough to be visible, and proposes three distinct steps for- ward—to abolish slavery by an act beyond assault from State legislatures, to declare slave-traders "enemies of the human race," i. e., persons below the operation of international laws, liable to be surrendered or executed though their offence was not committed within American jurisdiction, and to place much of the national debt under the protection, so to speak, of an entail. The American Constitution contains one remarkable provision which has hitherto been inoperative, but which may under certain circumstances invest Congress with some of the powers of a Parliament. That body can propose to change the Constitution whenever opinion is sufficiently unanimous to admit of a vote by a majority of two-thirds. The Presi- dent believes that this time has almost arrived, and urges this Congress to anticipate what he says its successor will certainly do, and make the abolition of slavery part of the Constitution. No State could then re-introduce it, any more than it could introduce hereditary power or privilege, and the slaves will be beyond attack even if a single State should attempt, as Arkansas once did, to re-enslave them. Any doubt as to the State power must be settled by an appeal to the Supreme Court, and the first act of the President after his Message was, as a practical comment on his meaning, to appoint Mr. Chase,— lawyer, financier, and determined abolitionist,—Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the single great functionary in the Union who is beyond removal. The second proposal was sug- gested doubtless by the Almeida incident, a slave-dealer of that name escaped from Cuba having been arrested by the 'resident's own order, as a person below the operation of laws, "enemy of the human race," as he says, and sur- rendered for punishment to Spain. Its effect, if accepted, will be to make the municipal law of the Union which prescribes death for elave.dealing beyond the confines of the Union, and under which Captain Gordon was hung in New York, applicable likewise to all foreigners living within the States. The third proposal will seem to English financiers a strange one, but it is not without a precedent. A desire to secure more permanence for wealth than their system naturally allows has been frequently displayed by American politicians. The old Homestead Bill certainly contained, and the new Homestead Bill, we believe, contains, a clause exempting the homestead and fifty acres round it, house, crops, and tools, from seizure for any debt whatever, whether due to the in- dividual or the State, and Mr. Lincoln simply extends a prin- ciple already admitted from real to personal estate. The object of the extension is of course twofold—to increase the value of the national securities by investing them with pri- vileges attached hitherto only to property under settlement, and so to tempt the small freeholders, the ultimate governing class, into purchasing them, that repudiation shall be impos- sible. If they, those quiet, thrifty, dour farmers can once be brought to see that Federal bonds are better security for dollars than the family chest, the dread of repudiation ends, for the farmers before they- will "suffer themselves to be cheated will skin the rich alive. It is a shrewd proposal, and subject to the provisoes which now limit settlement will probably work well, make the Federal bonds what Consols are in England—the single investment for widows, minors, and all manner of trusts.
For the rest, the President with his usual singleness of purpose confines himself to a consistent "pegging away." He will not, he says, suggest new terms of peace. Mr. Davis would not accept them, and for others than Mr. Davis he "means simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the Government whenever it shall cease on the part of those who began it," being precisely the terms every monarchy in Europe always offers to rebels. He will amnesty everybody, even those specially exempted from amnesty, he will take away no State security, he imposes no restriction on the poli- tical powers of those who submit, but submit they shall, visibly, and first of all. Nor will he alter the confiscation law, except by individual pardons, nor will he withdraw or modify the emancipation proclamation. He will simply war on until they who began the war have given it up, holding as sternly as any Roman patrician that the only policy for the Union is " parcere subject is sed debellare superbos,"—to spare the submis- sive, but war out the proud. He believes that he has the means. For men there are, he declares, more than ever there were, the lists showing nearly a quarter of a million more voters in 1864 than in 1860, and for means, "the resources of the Union are unexhausted, and believed to be inexhaustible." True the public debt was on the 1st July last 348,000,000/., may on 1st July next be 448,000,0001., exclusive, we fear, of currency,—bat then the revenue has risen from 12,000,000/. a year to 52,000,0001., the difference at 5 per cent, twice covering the debt, immigration goes on rapidly, there are 134,000,000 acres of surveyed land open to settlement, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad advances, new mines of gold, silver, and cinnabar are incessantly discovered ; the "steady expansion of population, improvement, and Governmental institutions over the new and unoccupied por- tions of our country have scarcely been Checked, much less impeded or destroyed by our great civil war,"—and in short there is in the President's mind no limit to material means. There is a limit nevertheless, man having the power, as the Turks have shown, of outstripping by his waste even the bounty of Nature in her most extravagant moods, but this proud roll-call of resources of which Americans never weary, has none the less a great meaning. Faith is the source of strength, and the wearisome faith in his means which the President exhibits gives him strength to persist to the end. Till the Union is exhausted, till all the wealth of the twenty faithful States—note as characteristic that he gives the list not geo- graphically but alphabetically, having just read them out of a book—and of territories like Nevada and Dacotah, Idaho and Montana, regions of which we in Europe can scarcely re- call the names has disappeared,—till the gold mines' and the silver mines, and the mines of cinnabar are all worked out, the President will go on, will in his lumbering but intelligible phrase "present the abandonment of arms to the national authority on the part of the insurgents as the only indispen- sable condition to ending the war on the part of Government," will in fact offer quarter, but not negotiate. There is some- thing in that steady bovine persistence, that resolve so iron that it cannot even bend to make phrases, which is infinitely impressive to spectators, which in the South mast create, more even than defeat in the field, a sense of the hopelessness of the contest. You may face any man however superior in strength, but the bravest will not stand up to the locomotive. The President does not boast, shows no hate, indulges in no cries of triumph over the "steady advance of our armies," threatens no foreign power, makes no prophecies of speedy success, comforts the people with no assurances of a Utopian future, but as if impelled by a force other than his own will slides quietly but irresistibly along the rails. He is in his groove and moving, and those who are in his path must ride with him, or lie fiat, or retreat, must at all events recognize that it is they and not he who are to move out of the appointed course. Mr. Hawthorne, who detested Mr. Lincoln for his want of refinement, once doubted audibly whether his detesta- tion was right, for, said he' "I have noticed that the people always in such crises hit on the right man." When the smoke of this struggle ceases to make English eyes smart, they also, we believe, will recognize that the intuition of the man of genius was truer than his taste.
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