THE IMPEACHMENT OF MR. JOHNSON.
THE struggle between the President and Congress is rapidly approaching a point at which one or the other party will be tempted to a resort to force. The national represen- tatives, exasperated by Mr. Johnson's open resistance to their policy, and still more embittered by the frequent proposals to start him as the Democratic candidate for re-election, have at last, as they think, found an opportunity for impeachment. The President, with that combative obstinacy which is the ruling feature in his character, has resolved that Mr. Stanton, law or no law, shall be dismissed, has dismissed him, and has nominated Mr. Ewing as his successor. If the Tenure of Office Bill applies to Mr. Stanton, a point on which lawyers entertain doubts, but the Senate expresses none, this dismissal is distinctly illegal, and the President is at last with- in the grasp of the majority. Accordingly, the House of Representatives, which is made by the Constitution absolute on all questions of impeachment, has resolved, " by a strict party vote,"—that is, by a majority of nearly three- fourths,—to impeach the President, and has taken the first formal steps to bring him before the Senate. That body has, as a preliminary, appointed a Select Committee to consider the Articles of Impeachment, and when these have been framed will, we doubt not, proceed at once to summon Mr. Johnson to its bar. It has, it must be remembered, no power whatever of declining to try any one formally impeached by the Lower House. Then will come the true crisis. The House will never endure to see its policy thwarted and its measures vetoed by a President under trial, and will resolve, by " a strict party vote," that impeachment involves suspension during inquiry. This resolution Mr. Johnson has pledged himself to resist by force, and from all the world knows of his character, no sense of duty to the nation, no fear of civil war, no care for his repu- tation with posterity will prevent him from keeping, or at all events trying to keep, his pledge. He has no considerable resources upon which he can rely, but he believes firmly that the mass of the population in the Northern States—about which he knows less than a Kerry labourer knows of the opinion of Belfast—is secretly in his favour. He has always mistaken Conservative feeling for confi- dence in himself, and believed that the men who dislike innovation will approve the greatest innovation of all, an attack upon representative independence. He has already summoned troops to Washington, who may by possibility obey his orders, but his true reliance must be upon the sympathizers with the South. The regular troops who will obey him in the teeth of General Grant's refusal to endorse his orders must be very few,—the bulk of the army, whatever its opinion, being too distant to act, and General Grant being by law irremovable without the Senate's consent, —and it is to the militia of Kentucky and Maryland that he must look for immediate support. To summon them will be to appeal openly to the South, and will terminate instantly and finally all Northern party differences. The sovereign class of the Union, the seventeen millions of free- holders, divided on every other point, are united on this, that the result of the Civil War shall not be thrown away, and the appeal once made to force the sympathizers with Mr. Johnson would be as few as the sympathizers with Mr. Davis. In a week the militia of eighteen States, half a million of trained and experienced soldiers, commanded by the two greatest Generals the war has produced, would be marching on the capital, and if Mr. Johnson escaped the scaffold, it would be because the Americans are in politics the least bloodthirsty of mankind.
The friends of Mr. Johnson in this country always miss this one cardinal point. So long as the President abstains from any resort to force, he will have in every State, city, and village of the Union a number of supporters, not indeed so large as is fancied here, but large enough to make an efficient party. The Democrats, to begin with, see that he is opposed to their rivals, the devotees of State sovereignty per- ceive that his action supports their theory, while the legalists, that is, probably one-third of all Americans alive, doubt whether the law has not been hitherto on his side. But there is one passion in the North stronger than party feel-
ing, stronger than local patriotism, stronger than rever- ence for law, and that is the passion of nationality, the absolute determination that no man, and no State, and no party shall make the realization of the national ideal finally impossible. The South would have made it impos- sible, and it is the peculiar misfortune of Mr. Johnson's position that the instant he appeals to* force, the moment he substitutes bayonets for vetoes, he must appeal also to the South. No State not originally slaveholding will send him a man to avert a downfall which, even if Congress had abstained from impeachment, could not have been post- poned beyond November next, or to prevent a trial which, legal or not, is at least more legal than civil war. If he sits quiet, he will be deposed; if he appeals to the sword, he appeals also to the Secessionists ; and even at the price of revolution, even though the immediate cause be bad, even though Con- gress be, for itself, without a friend, the North will put the Secessionists down.
The end of all this, we repeat once more, can only be Revolution, a recasting more or less formal of a Constitution which, as we have affirmed ever since Sumter fell, has been outgrown by the national needs. It is possible, of course, that the revolution may not be avowed, that Mr. Johnson may yield, and General Grant enter the White House, to be, as he says he will be, the Executive Agent of the national represen- tatives, the American Premier, instead of President. But it is also possible, should force be employed, that the revolution may take another form. One marked result of this long struggle between the President and Congress has been to deepen a doubt, always latent in the American mind, whether the Presidency itself is an expedient institution, whether the " one-man power," as it is racily described, is consistent with true Republicanism or the sovereignty of the people. We have before us a pamphlet of eight pages now circulating through the Union, in which the total and final abolition of the Pre- sidency in favour of an Executive Committee of Congress,—in fact, of a Parliamentary Cabinet,—is recommended with ex- traordinary cogency and power. The writer points out that the Constitution, as at present existing, is really an elective monarchy ; that one man can for four years resist the will of the nation, however unanimous ; that for nine months in every year the President is the entire Government ; that he actually appoints the judges who alone can try the legality of his acts ; that the recent Acts of Congress diminish the danger only at the price of paralyzing the Executive ; that the power of pardon enables the President always to find allies ; that the extreme desire for the office and its immense weight in the State makes every election a demoralizing influence ; that Congress is more responsible to the President than the Presi- dent to Congress :- " The idea of responsibility involves that of a decided subordination—a dependence of him who is responsible upon them to whom he is responsible. According to what has been here said, however, Congress is more dependent upon the President than the President is upon Congress. The messages of Mr. Johnson show that the actors' parts have already been exchanged ; for the President impeaches Congress, while Congress allows him—notwithstanding all his misdeeds—to go scot-free. The President has the elements of power ; Con- gress has but words : he can act ; Congress can but talk ; he orders the Legislature to assemble and—as the case may be— to disperse ; the Legislature must seek him " at the other end of the avenue :" he has a thousand favours to give or with- hold, toward the legislators ; these may, at the utmost, occasionally refuse office to one of his creatures. Under these circumstances, the very worst of Presidents would hardly be disturbed in his equanimity by his responsibility to Congress ; particularly, as the Constitution still further protects him, by the contrivance that the representatives of the people have but the right to accuse him, whereas two-thirds of the repre- sentatives of States are requisite to sentence him." Ideas like these would, in time of peace, be slow of entrance among a people accustomed to regard their constitu- tion as something semi-divine, but an open struggle between the two powers will, if it occurs, shake the confidence of Americans in their institutions as nothing else could have done, and it is to an open struggle that events appear to be
tending. No nation has ever yet tried its king without a revolution, and the impeachment of a President differs from
the trial of a King only in this, that those who impeach have a belief, which those who try have not, that they are acting within the limits of the law. The calmness and legal sense which mark the freeholders of the North may prevent an
open outbreak, but 'every day reveals more clearly the one grand defect of the American Constitution, It makes the nation sovereign, yet refuses the people means to make their will directly and immediately executive.
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