The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-02-09

more enormous How shall the vast public
debt be paid, If the money collected is use
lessly squanderedf Will not universal
crash finally be the result
s'By Command of the President.''
From the ". Y. Forld.
II we are to believe the Tribune, General
Grant proposes to administer the Government
of the United States precisely as he admins
ters the army. He has discovered the polit-
cal leaders Of the Republican party, the men
by whom he was selected as their candidate
for the Presidency, TO be set Of scurvy and
self-seeking incapables, "clamorous, uneasy,
and eager" says the Tribune, "for mere ad-
vancement," and so he has made up his mind
to make his Cabinet "a personal staff" This
determination the Tribune impliedly applauds,
speaking of it with, we will not say with
reverential awe, but at least with bated breath,
quite in the tone in which the semi-Oficial or
"oficious" journals of Paris twenty years ago
were wont to speak of the words and measures
and the supposed purposes OF the Prince
President, then silently preparing himself
for his decisive struggle with the Assembly.
There is much plausibility in the Irt6une's
statement of General Grants intentions. If
General Grant was preparing to organize a
constitutional Cabinet after the manner of
his predecessors in the Presidential office, il is
all but certain that its leading members must
ere this have come 10 be known in political
circles. II Cabinet were a conspiracy, II
might well enough be got together secretly as
Guy Fawkes brought his gunpowder barrels
into the vaults of the Parliament House. or as
Louis Napoleon initiated his friends and
personal sta6'' in the project of the coup
dHGt Of December, 1851. But there is
nothing necessarily shameful or frightful in
the consultations OF man who is shortly
about to assume the Chief Magistraoy of a re-
public with the men upon whose intelligence
and whose experience he is 10 rely for the
assistance necessary to make his admins
tration success. A President who has q
great party at his back in time of peace is
not military commander planning q cam
paign. The publicity which would tend to
disaster in the case of the one parsonage is a
very important element of success in the case
OF the other. Unless General Grant is
ashamed of the men whom he foresees that he
will be forced to call into his personal staiI,n
or unless he has really determined, as the
Tribune tells as he has, to make ior himself
personal STAFF and nothing bat personal
stat'' Of his constitutional advisers, there
need be no explanation Of the extraordinary
cloud of mystery in which he has thus far
shrOuded his plans that would not be disoredit-
a pie to his common sense.
1t has no precedent in our own history, and
no precedent in the history OF any other
country, save in such cases of secret and am
bilious plottings after the usurpation OF power
as We have already cited.
The Iribune's absurd allusion to the ap-
p0intment of Alexander Hamilton by General
Washington as an instance in which the head
of the republic selected his advisers on the
theory which IL now declares to be the theory
Of General Grant, cannot even be pretended TO
cover this aspect of the affair. General Wash
ipgton made no secret of his intention to call
Hamilton into his counsels. Hamilton en-
tered upon his duties as Secretary of the
Treasury in November, 1889; but, months
before that, WolcOtt and others were recon-
mended to him for Office in his department;
and the country at large knew very well who
the Presidents advisers would be, even before
it had been fully settled upon what their
several functions should be. OF course we
need hardly add that when Washington called
Hamilton to the Treasury he did not detail
him" to duty from his personal staff, for
the very good and sufficient reason that
Washington had ceased to have either mill
taTy command or a personal staff' long
before he was raised to the Presidency.
The truth is that General Grant, properly
speaking, is our first strictly military Presi-
dent; he is the first OF our Presidents, that is,
who, having received a purely military edu-
cation and won his popularity exclusively as
y soldier, has been called TO the Chief Magis-
tracy directly from the army. General Wash
iugtOn belonged, by his habits of mind and
If we may use such an expression without
being misunderstOod-by his caste, to civil
quite as much as to military life. He was a
country gentleman, familiar as the country
gentlemen OF Virginia in his time were with
civil duties and legal responsibilities; he had
81 ryed in Law. making bodies. General Jack
son was trained lawyer and legislator. He
had served the State and become respectable
as Judge before he became celebrated as a
general. General Harrison was Northwest
ern politician and civil official both before
and after the episodicsl military career which
finally commended him as an available person
TO the Wings, hungering for a candidate.