our idea of the finer and fairer portion of humanity, and exclaim with Schiller

'Honour to woman, maid, mother, and wife!

Those roses of heaven in the garland of life.'

We cannot drop the pen without alluding to one characteristic of the works of George Eliot which has deeply impressed us. We mean their inexpressible sadness. Mr. Ruskin speaks of Scott as imbued with a spirit of sadness, but this is, we think, a mistake. Scott felt the external griefs that overtook him; the mishaps of life smote him sore; but the very capacity of feeling keenly the frowns of fortune proves that a man knows little of the profounder anguish of the soul. Scott was to the heart a happy man; and his sympathy with the sadness of autumn leaves and plaining streams was but his sense of those shades by which nature throws out her splendours, those lulls and undertones by which nature brings repose and depth into the orchestral music of the year. Body and soul,' says George Eliot, 'must ' renew their force to suffer as well as to enjoy.' Our very strength is a machinery for the endurance of pain! doubt whether there is so sad a sentiment in all the works of Scott. While this poor little heart,' she says again, was being bruised with a weight too heavy for it, nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and ter'rible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; 'the tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the 'sun was making brilliant day to busy nations on the other 'side of the swift earth. The stream of human thought was hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer 'was at his telescope; the great ships were labouring over 'the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit ' of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest; and sleepless 'statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. 'What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty 'torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of 'the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the 'long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty.' A very sad philosophy; not altogether a false philosophy on any showing; for life is sorrowful, and we are all accompanied, in our voyage along that melancholy main,' by the wailing of homeless winds, and the restless, aimless hurrying of weary waves but if there is no gleam on the far horizon, if that ray from the Infinite which redeems the dark foreground of human life from horror into sublimity is absent, then is the sadness

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deeper than that common to men, and the sorrow not that of hope, but that of despair. Nature is cruel, Christ alone is kind; and the stern mournfulness of these books of George Eliot's gives us the idea of one who does not know, or who has forgotten, that the stone was rolled from the heart of the world on the morning when Christ arose.

ART. VII.—(1.) The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, &c. &c. By EDWARD MCPHERSON, Clerk of the House of Representatives, &c. &c., Washington.

1864. (2.) A Political Manual for 1866, &c. &c. By EDWARD MCPHERSON. 1866.

THE stormy sea of American politics has not yet heaved itself to rest, and it is hazardous to predict from what direction the next gale will come, or what new agitations it may occasion. It may be safe, however, to record the principal occurrences which have happened since the close of the war, and to explain their significance. In this way, perhaps, we may aid our readers to interpret their bearing on the future of the great Republic, as well as to forecast the character and the issue of the internal struggles which are certain to agitate her citizens in the months and years that are just before them.

On the 3rd of April, 1865, the city of Richmond was occupied by the forces of the United States, the so-called Confederate Government having abandoned it on the previous day. On the 9th of the same month, General Lee surrendered to General Grant the army of Virginia, on terms that were most honourable to the good sense and the clemency of the victorious general, and to the Government which he represented.

This event was regarded by nearly all parties as being the end of the war. The astounding tidings were received by the people of the South with horror and despair. That which they had not dared to confess to themselves that they had foreboded, or even conceived to be possible, had now befallen them, and they were sick at heart. The joyful news, for which the North had waited so long that they had scarcely dared to hope for it longer, had become suddenly a reality, and the whole population was jubilant with exultation.

On the evening of the 14th of the same April, the wise and magnanimous Lincoln was shot, and the nation was startled as by a stroke of lightning from a summer sky. The exulting North was moved to alternate grief and indignation, while the panic-stricken men of the South looked up for a moment in mute wonder to divine what new evil was in store for them, now

Sherman in North Carolina.

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that the man was taken away whom they had at first ridiculed and scorned as an uncouth savage, and had but slowly learned to reverence as the meekest and most true-hearted of antagonists, and they were delivered into the hands of one of their own 'poor whites,' whose wife they had maltreated, whose temper they knew, and whose stern threatenings against those whom he called traitors to their country had been uttered in no studied words.

On the 18th of April, General Sherman and General Johnston signed a memorandum or basis of agreement as preliminary to the surrender of that part of the Confederate army which was still in the field in North Carolina, which deserves to be read now with careful attention, as it so well illustrates the diplomatic sagacity of the Southern leaders, and as it brings out so distinctly the points which are still in dispute between the Southern people and the people and Government of the United States. This memorandum required the concurrent or co-ordinate action of the State and the Federal authorities in the final settlement, which by implication would deny or leave undetermined the great point for the adjustment of which the war had been conducted, viz.. the supremacy of the Federal Government. It stipulated for the recognition by the executive of the United States of the existing State governments, on their officers and legislatures taking the oath prescribed by the constitution of the United States. This again would have been a most important advantage could it have been allowed. As the sequel will show, all hope of obtaining anything like this was abandoned very early in the course of the adjustments that have actually been made. Still further it was stipulated that the people of all the States should be guaranteed, so far as the Executive was concerned, their political rights and franchises, as well as their rights of person and property. This again was practically denied by President Johnson himself in many of the first acts of his administration, and it is now a mooted question between him and Congress, whether it is competent for the Executive to decide whether forfeited political rights or franchises shall be restored to a State or its citizens when these have sought to destroy the Government.

But this memorandum found no favour with the people. The telegraph which sent it everywhere among the loyal multitudes flashed back their indignant and scornful rejection of such terms, and of the principles which they implied. Every farmer and mechanic who had fought, or whose son had fought in the field, every mother who had prayed and laboured for the supremacy of the Federal Government, saw through the meaning of these conditions, and rejected them with scorn. Sherman, who

of all the generals had been the idol of the people, was for the moment cast down from his high place in their confidence. The newly-inaugurated President neither wished at that time, nor would he have dared to sanction such an adjustment. General Grant was despatched to North Carolina to order the resumption of hostilities, or if need be, to displace General Sherman, and to annul the armistice and set aside the terms of settlement on which it had rested. Under his wise and magnanimous direction, the army of Johnston was surrendered to Sherman on the same terms as those which had been previously accorded to General Lee, General Grant endorsing the transaction by his approval.

The whole country stopped to take breath. There was a lull in the excitement of the public mind. It was broken, in part by the sad procession that attended the remains of the great and good Lincoln from Washington to his western tomb, a procession witnessed by a million of men, and followed in thought by millions more. The capture of the deluded band of assassins who had effected his death occupied the thoughts of many. The suspicion that the head of the Confederate Government was privy to this conspiracy was strengthened into firm belief by the offer of a reward from the new President for the capture of Davis, and of several other prominent personages. This prepared the way for a not unnatural exultation when the Confederate President was taken in Georgia, under circumstances that in all their results were less inconvenient for the person who was captured, than embarrassing to the Government that captured him,

These momentary diversions of the public excitement being passed, the attention of all thinking men in every part of the country began to be earnestly engaged with that great problem of reconstruction which is yet far enough from being solved, either in theory or in fact. To the Southern people the problem was one of the most intense and momentous interest. To every citizen of prominence or wealth it brought with it the question whether his life and estates were forfeited, whether he should be suffered to dwell in the country which he had called his home, and to gather again the remnants of property that the desolations of war had spared him, or whether he must suffer imprisonment, death or confiscation as a convicted traitor, or be driven to a foreign land as a despairing exile. As he turned his expectant eyes to the Government which now had him in its power, and to the people who were behind the Government, it was not easy to divine the answer of either. Both the Government and the people had already distinctly reprobated the terms which the skilful diplomatists of the South had

suggested through General Johnston. The man who had been accidentally elevated to the place of Lincoln was the political and personal antagonist of their leading politicians. Just before the breaking out of the war, when he was a member of the Senate from Tennessee, he had exposed and disowned the secret counsels of his associates, and had not scrupled to brand them as traitors. When he returned to that State for a season, he was driven out of it as a public enemy. His wife was imprisoned and insulted, and his family had suffered personal indignities and severe physical deprivation. So soon as the Federal authority was re-established in Tennessee, he was appointed its first Military Governor, and he had been chosen Vice-President at the election of Lincoln for the second time. He was now at the head of the Government in the double capacity of commander-in-chief of its armies, and of civil ruler. As the first, he was clothed with those fearfully irresponsible powers, to the exercise of which by the amiable Lincoln even his own friends had not always been reconciled. As the second, he could direct the policy of the Government in the adjustment of the terms under which the revolted States and their citizens might return again to their places in the Union. Almost his first public declaration had been that treason is a crime, and 'must be punished as a crime. It must not be regarded as a 'mere difference of political opinion.' Every Union-man and 'the Government should be remunerated out of the pockets of 'those who have inflicted this great suffering upon the country.' The penalties of the law, in a stern and inflexible manner, 'should be executed upon conscious, intelligent, and influential 'traitors, the leaders who have deceived thousands upon thou'sands of labouring men who have been drawn into this rebellion.' Almost his first official act was to set a price upon the head of Jefferson Davis. What could be hoped from such a President as this? What might not reasonably be feared? We do not wonder that the first impulse and thought of many of the leading men of the South were, to flee the United States for ever, to emigrate to Brazil, to seek military service in Mexico, or to sojourn in Europe for an indefinite period. The undefined fears of these leading men were not likely to be greatly relieved by the President's proclamation of amnesty of the 29th of May, for by its very terms almost every such person was formally excepted from that amnesty; and to make everything sure, the possession of an estate in value above four thousand pounds sterling was in all cases made a sufficient ground for such exception. To the President himself was reserved the exercise of pardon in every one of these cases, which suggested bound