lute good sense. What is now demanded of Congress is unanimity
in the best course that is feasible. They should recollect that Wisdom
is more likely to be wounded in the division of those who should be her
friends, than either of the parties to the quarrel. Our difficulties
are by no means so great as timid or interested people would represent
them to be. We are to decide, it is true, for posterity; but the
question presented to us is precisely that which every man has to
decide in making his will,--neither greater nor less than that, nor
demanding a wisdom above what that demands. The power is in our own
hands, so long as it is prudent for us to keep it there; and we are
justified, not in doing simply what we will with our own, but what is
best to be done. The great danger in the present posture of affairs
seems to be lest the influence which in Mr. Lincoln's case was inherent
in the occasion and the man should have held over in the popular mind
as if it were entailed upon the office. To our minds more is to be
apprehended in such a conjuncture from the weakness than from the
strength of the President's character.

There is another topic which we feel obliged to comment on, regretting
deeply, as we do, that the President has given us occasion for it, and
believing, as we would fain do, that his own better judgment will lead
him to abstain from it in the future. He has most unfortunately
permitted himself to assume a sectional ground. Geography is learned to
little purpose in Tennessee, if it does not teach that the Northeast as
well as the Southwest is an integral and necessary part of the United
States. By the very necessity of his high office, a President becomes
an American, whose concern is with the outward boundaries of his
country, and not its internal subdivisions. One great object of the
war, we had supposed, was to abolish all fallacies of sectional
distinction in a patriotism that could embrace something wider than a
township, a county, or even a State. But Mr. Johnson has chosen to
revive the paltry party-cries from before that deluge which we hoped
had washed everything clean, and to talk of treason at both ends of the
Union, as if there were no difference between men who attempted the
life of their country, and those who differ from him in their judgment
of what is best for her future safety and greatness. We have heard
enough of New England radicalism, as if that part of the country where
there is the mos