ng a
Congress elected by the same votes and secured by the same guaranties
that elected him to his place and secure him in it,--a Congress whose
validity he has acknowledged by sending in his messages to it, by
signing its bills, and by drawing his pay under its vote; and yet
thinking men are not to be allowed to doubt the propriety of leaving
the gravest measure that ever yet came up for settlement by the country
to a party and a man so reckless as these have shown themselves to be.
Mr. Johnson talks of the danger of centralization, and repeats the old
despotic fallacy of many tyrants being worse than one,--a fallacy
originally invented, and ever since repeated, as a slur upon democracy,
but which is a palpable absurdity when the people who are to be
tyrannized over have the right of displacing their tyrants every two
years. The true many-headed tyrant is the Mob, that part of the
deliberative body of a nation which Mr. Johnson, with his Southern
notions of popular government, has been vainly seeking, that he might
pay court to it, from the seaboard to St. Louis, but which hardly
exists, we are thankful to say, as a constituent body, in any part of
the Northern States outside the city of New York.

Mr. Seward, with that playfulness which sits upon him so gracefully,
and which draws its resources from a reading so extensive that not even
_John Gilpin_ has escaped its research, puts his argument to the people
in a form where the Socratic and arithmetic methods are neatly
combined, and asks, "How many States are there in the Union?" He
himself answers his own question for an audience among whom it might
have been difficult to find any political adherent capable of so
arduous a solution, by asking another, "Thirty-six?" Then he goes on to
say that there is a certain party which insists that the number shall
be less by ten, and ends by the clincher, "Now how many stars do you
wish to see in your flag?" The result of some of Mr. Johnson's
harangues was so often a personal collision, in which the more ardent
on both sides had an opportunity to see any number of new
constellations, that this astronomical view of the case must have
struck the audience rather by its pertinence than its novelty. But in
the argument of the Secretary, as in that of the President, there is a
manifest confusion of logic, and something very like a _petitio
principii_. We might answer Mr. Seward's question with, "As many fixed
stars as you please, but