The Sun.
London, England, 1867-08-10 00:00:00

mittee knows, and that the efforts of the minority

have for the last six months been directed simply to

making up in bulk of evidence for what was lacking
in quality. When this movement was first started,
nearly a year ago, we attempted to show why it
ought not to succeed, and we prophesied that it
would not meet with any popular favour, although
at that time the country was seething with excite-
ment, and the penalties of differing from Messrs.
Stevens and Boutwell on any public question were #
heavier than they are are now. We have never

since then abated one jot of our confidence in the
popular good sense with regard to it, in spite of
many vigorous remonstrances from excitable sub-
scribers, and the result has fully justified us. So,
too, when shortly after the Nation was started, we
ventured to controvert the theory which was set
aflmt in Massachusetts, that the Supreme Court

could be got to establish negro suffrage by declaring
all governments to be non-republican which made

electoral discriminations based on colour, we in-

curred some obloquy for taking such a cold, heartless
view of the powers of the court in opposition to such

weighty authorities as Messrs. Boutwell and Sumner,

and we forget how many others of like respecta-
bility. We were not shaken, however, and we have
lived to see this same Court decide against Mr.
Boutwell's whole plan of reconstruction, and see
him denouncing it with his usual fervour and
threatening it with abolition for its perverseness.
We have n 43 the slightest doubt that the confisca-

tion scheme will meet with the same fate as the im-

peachment scheme. The knowledge of history and
of legislative science may not be very widely dif-
fused amongst the American people, but the sound

common sense, the feelings, hopes, and sympathies
out of which the lessons of history and the princi-

pies of legislative science are drawn, pervade all
classes and conditions, and any writer or speaker
who holds to these lessons and principles firmly may
feel right well assured that even if his path should
temporarily diverge from the popular path, he will
not fail to come out in the end in the same place.

Speaker Colfax told the story of reconstruction
to the crowd under his window on Saturday night,
in Washington, in fewer words and with more force
and effect than we have ever seen it told, and it is a
story which does infinite credit both to Congress
and to the people. The process has now lasted two
years ; it has been marked by much foolish speak-

ing, no doubt, and much waste of time, but we
doubt if it world be possible to point to a legislative
process in any age or country of equal intricacy and
gravity which has been marked by so few mis-
takes. The essential facts of the case were, when
the war closed, little known ; they were infinite in
number and variety, and they had been complicated
by Mr. Johnson's premature and unwarrantable
interference. Every step taken, therefore, at the
outset, had to be tentative. Nothing positive was
done till the South had fairly recovered its self-
possession, and had revealed its real spirit. This
spirit was then met by a minimum of coercive
legislation. The Freedmen's Bureau Act and the
Civil Rights Act were the least that could be done;
if anything was done at all, to secure to the negroes
not political rights, properly so called, be it re-
membered, but the common rights of humanity ;
and the Southern States were offered, in the Con-
stitutional amendment, conditions of restoration in
which the North exacted nothing whatever as a
victor in a bloody struggle. It simply asked the
South to adapt its political organisation to the
alterations in its social organisation. The South,
acting under the advice of Northern Democratic
politicians—perhaps the shallowest politicians which
any country or age has ever produced—refused this
offer with much bombast and rant. A whole year
was then taken for the next step, and this next step
was to arrange machinery for bringing the South
into the Union nolens volens, not as a slave or a
vassal, but with every form and guarantee, right
and privilege, which has ever been found in, or
suggested for, a free government.
Affliction and disappointment have, beyond a
doubt, reconciled the Southern whites to their fate,
and this time the revolted States will qualify for
readmission, and will be readmitted. The duty of
the Northern people in the meantime is clear. They
ought, in the first place, to embody in their own
legislation the principles they are forcing on the
acceptance of the South ; in the next place, bear
with patience and good temper any capers which
Southern politicians may be pleased to cut while
coming back to their old places ; in the third place,
devote themselves strenuously during the next ten
years to the work of education. If the experiment
of freedom and equality should not end well in the
South, it is ignorance that will cause its failure.
What the blacks as well as the whites need is not
land but light, and this no expense or labour ought
to be spared to supply, and the more demagogues
rave and rant, the more car-loads of teachers and
books we ought to send off. Every time Governor
Perry makes a speech, a dozen fresh schools ought
to be opened with Northern money. Every time
Wendell Phillips calls for forty acres of land and
a nomination for the Vice-Presidency for every
black head of a house, a ton of school books, besides
periodicals, ought to be ordered and despatched•
Of this work we cannot do too much, and in it yie
cannot waste or go astray.