dence could link them; and yet, the moment it became for
the interest of the chieftain, in whom alone was the landed title, to
convert the mountain slopes into sheep-walks, farewell to all
considerations of ancestral legend and ideal picturesqueness! The
clansmen were dispossessed of their little holdings, and shipped off to
the colonies like cattle, by the very men for whom they would have
given their lives without question. The relation, just like that of
master and slave, or the proposed one of superior and dependent, in the
South, had become an anachronism, to preserve which would have been a
vain struggle against that power of Necessity which the Greeks revered
as something god-like. In our own case, so far from making it for the
interest of the ruling classes at the South to elevate the condition of
the black man, the policy of Mr. Johnson offers them a bribe to keep
him in a state of hopeless dependency and subjection. It gives them
more members of Congress in proportion as they have more unrepresented
inhabitants. Mr. Beecher asks us (and we see no possible reason for
doubting the honesty of his opinions, whatever may be their soundness)
whether we are afraid of the South, and tells us that, if we allow them
to govern us, we shall richly deserve it. It is not that we are afraid
of, nor are we in the habit of forming our opinions on any such
imaginary grounds; but we confess that we are afraid of committing an
act of national injustice, of national dishonor, of national breach of
faith, and therefore of national unwisdom and weakness. Moderation is
an excellent thing; but taking things for granted is not moderation,
and there may be such a thing as being immoderate in concession and
confidence. Aristotle taught us long ago that true moderation was as
far from the too-much of blind passion on the one hand as from that of
equally blind lukewarmness on the other. We have an example of wise
reconstructive policy in that measure of the Bourbon-restoration
ministry, which compensated the returned emigrants for their
confiscated estates by a grant from the public treasury. And the
measure was wise, for the reason that it enabled the new proprietors
and the ousted ones to live as citizens of the same country together
without mutual hatred and distrust. We do not propose to compensate the
slaveholder for the loss of his chattels, because the cases are not
parallel, and because Mr. Johnson no less than we acknowledges the
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