TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ACQUITTAL OF THE PRESIDENT.
MR. JOHNSON has been acquitted. Not quite two-thirds of the Senate think him guilty of "high crimes and mis- demeanours." The view which we took last week of the probable issue of the Impeachment trial was mistaken. The vote on the Eleventh Article really did test the vote on all the other articles,—and this though we were right in conjecturing that the adjournment was carried by the party favourable to convicting, and for the express purpose of increasing the chances of convicting. It would seem that the indecent violence of the Republican party organs,—which have imputed the most monstrous motives to all members of their party who hesitated at this, as we admit, extreme application of the only means at present open to Congress for getting rid of a mischievous, and even unconstitutional President,—has been one cause of the deficiency in the vote. Chief Justice Chase's (we suspect) rather questionable doctrine that to prove a guilty intent in the President was essential for the purpose of conviction,— that the proof of an actual breach of the Constitution would not be adequate legal presumption of a guilty intent,—was a great weight in the scale. The fear of Mr. Johnson's suc- cessor, Mr. Wade, who not only was indelicate enough to vote against the man whom he would succeed, but had been foolish enough to pledge himself in favour of carrying a high protec- tive scale of duties during his nine months of office, if he had displaced Mr. Johnson, was a fresh weight in the scale of acquittal. But most of all, probably, the small section of the Republican party which turned the scale by voting for his acquittal were influenced by the class of considerations which we publish to-day under the familiar signature of "A Yankee," and which we may describe shortly as reasserting the biblical sacredness of the letter of the Constitution. "A Yankee's" view of the matter is tolerably simple. If we have misunder- stood him our readers can correct us byreading what he has said. But we understand his view to be something as follows :— " The Constitution itself was intended to give the President an independent power to check, and, even in certain cases, over-ride Congress. It also provided the only means by which the Constitution could be altered. It did not provide any means by which a President, resolute to thwart and obstruct Congress within certain obvious legal limits, could be re- moved. It is not clear that Mr. Johnson overstepped those legal limits. It is clear that any breach of the Constitution would be infinitely more fatal than any succession of P.resi- dents perpetually at loggerheads with Congress, perpetually bent on thwarting the policy of the Legislature." Hence, of course, the duty of acquitting Mr. Johnson. Perhaps we should rather attribute to our correspondent a clear belief that Mr. Johnson has not overstepped the bounds of the Constitu- tion, than a doubt whether he has. In this view, however, he is so peculiar that we can scarcely follow him. That it may be a question whether, in appointing General Lorenzo Thomas ad interim Secretary of War, not only without submitting the appointment to the approbation of the Senate, but with the positive knowledge that the Senate would disapprove him, and indeed, really because he knew that they would disapprove him,'he violated the Constitution or not, we can understand. We certainly do not understand how any thinking man can regard it as beyond question that such an act was constitutional. This, however, is a very small point. What we wish to discuss now is the political value and consequences of this solemn affirmation that it is not only no "high crime and misdemeanour," but a legitimate exercise of prerogative,—for if it is not a high crime and misdemeanour, there is clearly no other legal ob- jection to it,—for the President of the United States to use his whole influence, private and official, throughout his tenure of office, to weaken and neutralize the legislation of the Congress whose laws he is bound to execute. The Constitution, then, has no power to develop new vital principles that are not written down within it. Though the time be come ever so much to make it felt that one part of the Constitution is more vital than another, that its spirit must at times be protected even at the sacrifice of a portion of the letter,—the Americans will hear of no such doctrine. They would say, apparently, "If you cannot bring to bear the constitutional rules for the altera- tion of the Constitution, you may fret under the Constitution as much as you please, but it must be submitted to as if it were the law of God itself." Now, we remark, first, upon this, lent lawyers and a great number of the best Republicans in the United States felt, we imagine, the gravest doubts about the constitutional character of many of the acts done by Presi- dent Lincoln for the preservation of the Union. The war itself made upon States of the Union claiming the right to. secede,—the suspension of Habeas Corpus in regions not actually reached by war,—the proclamation of emancipation, an ac1. positively and indignantly proclaimed void of all legal force, by very many Republicans, and by our correspondent himself among the number, if we are not mistaken,—the issue of notes not payable on demand, in other words, of a forced loan,. under constitutional provisions on taxation which seemed to. most lawyers directly to prohibit instead of sanctioning such a tax,—all these were done without scruple under the Presi- dent's "war power," as to the limits of which a vast num- ber of Republicans must have felt the greatest doubt. We confess we took these acts, and the general approbation with which they were received by the people, as an assertion by the people that the words of the Constitution were not to be construed to bind the Republic too closely, or to veto any policy obviously essential to its own safety or existence. In the view of almost all English and many of the best American lawyers, the letter of the Constitution was ignored a hundred. times, and on matters of the highest moment, during the Civil War. Under the easy pretext of "the war power" anything was done that needed to be done. What "A Yankee" calls "the absoluteness of our written Constitution "seemed to some of us a very relative and variable element indeed in American political life, between 1861 and 1865. And it certainly is a. matter of some surprise to us, who have watched with sympathy the signs of this large freedom from fine legal scruple where political life and nationality were at stake, to find it now reviving again with vastly greater tenacity than ever, even in a case where it really is fairly a matter for popular opinion to determine whether the admitted political offences of the President against the rules, customs, and obligations of his position were to be considered high crimes and misdemea- nours' or not.
It will be said, however, and, so far as the letter of the assertion goes, with great truth, that every State must con- strue the limitations on its own freedom of action more liberally in the face of great and urgent peril, like a civil war, than it can properly be allowed to do in time of peace. In peace the greatest of all securities for liberty is a literal and anxious obedience to law—good, bad, or indifferent. In the crisis of a death struggle every obstacle must go down before the urgent duty of fighting for your life. We admit the distinction, but utterly deny its applicability to the recent. crisis. We say that for all the purposes of this distinction,. the period since it suited President Johnson, for his own political views, to declare peace re-established, has been one of as imminent peril to the political life of the American nation as was any period of the war. Sir Cornewall Lewis was not wrong when he predicted that the great troubles of the national or Union party would begin when the war was over. If he could have foreseen that those troubles would be enhanced by a President profoundly identified with the policy which caused the war, and using his whole political in- fluence to foster the growth of a new generation of Southerners of the same separatist tendencies and the same white-caste passions as the one which led the South into secession, he might have spoken with redoubled confidence. We have seen President Johnson doing all in his power to. support the worst scum of the New Orleans negro-haters. We have seen at least one of the States which had ratified the amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery, re- tracting its adhesion to that amendment under the impulse to pro-slavery hopes given by Mr. Johnson. In one word, we have seen the most perilous and anxious period of the restored Union,—the infancy of the reunited nation,—torn by the wild and savage hopes of a rekindled separatism in consequence of Mr. Johnson's policy and efforts. What a childish thing it seems to English observers to tell them that, in such a case, any amendment to the Constitution which might have made the President removable for suddenly obstructing the policy of Congress, should have been prepared and carried through in the usual way. Why, with all President Lincoln's influence and energy, with a united Cabinet and the prestige of a triumphant war policy to aid him, the requisite adhesion of three-fourths of the States to the anti-slavery amendment was only obtained with the greatest difficulty, and, as we believe, by somewhat questionable devices as to the constitution of new
President Johnson's re'gime, have been obtained at all. If it be absolutely essential, as we believe it is, for the reunion and political prosperity of the rent American nation, that the Pre- sident should cordially carry out the policy of Congress, and during the next ten or twenty years at least, allow no divided front to be presented to the old white caste who ruled so long in the South, then it is certain that no narrow constitutional scruples, such as failed to hamper the Unionists during the war, should have been allowed to bind them now, while the whole principle of the war is still at stake. If the President can thwart the policy of reconstruction by legal means, the same President might have thwarted the whole war policy by legal means, and there would have been no remedy. Had Mr. Buchanan remained in office, he would have acted in the spirit in which Mr. Johnson has acted recently,—in which the next President may act if he so pleases,—and apparently the letter of the Constitution would have imposed on the people of the United States only the duty of patience. What we assert is that the recent crisis demanded, as much as the war ever de- manded, a straining of the letter of the law so as to unite all the forces of the Union on the side of freedom. It is idle to talk of constitutional remedies which cannot be applied. To get three-fourths of the States to ratify an amendment which would, practically, make the President little more than an English Prime Minister, might be possible under a strong and popular President who wished heartily to see that change .effected. Under Mr. Johnson, or any President like Mr. John- son, any President who would make the people earnestly wish for such a change, it would be just as possible as carrying an amendment to that Constitution of the Earth which makes it revolve round the sun. We hold that the recent crisis was one in which extra-constitutional measures were needful for the pub- lic safety ; that the history of the war shows that such extra- constitutional measures have not been objected to on sufficient occasion ; and that only the blind legalism of men like our correspondent "A Yankee" prevents them from seeing that. But the end is not yet. To the weakness and vio- lence,—we fear, in some degree, the unworthiness and cor- ruptness,—of the party which has most bitterly opposed the President, it seems to us to be due that the greatness and dignity of their cause have been but partially visible to the American people, and, therefore, that that cause has failed.
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