rty years preceding it.

It will not escape observation that the most frequent resort to the
veto has been by those Presidents who were chosen by the political
organization which has always declared its hostility to Executive
power. The Democratic party had its origin and its early growth in
the cry against the overshadowing influence of the Presidential office
--going so far in their denunciations as to declare that it was
aping royalty in its manners and copying monarchy in its prerogatives.
The men who made this outcry defeated John Quincy Adams who never used
the veto, and installed Jackson who resorted to it on all occasions
when his judgment differed from the conclusion of a majority of
Congress. Neither Taylor nor Fillmore--both reared in the Whig school
--ever attempted to defeat the will of Congress, though each wielded
Executive power at a time when questions even more exciting than
those of Jackson's era engaged public attention. Mr. Lincoln
presents a strong contrast with his predecessors,--Pierce and
Buchanan,--illustrating afresh the contradiction that the party
declaiming most loudly against Executive power has constantly abused
it. Mr. Tyler and Mr. Johnson were both chosen by the opponents of
the Democracy, but they were both reared in that school, and both
returned to it--exhibiting in their apostasy the readiness with which
the Democratic mind turns to the tyranny of the veto.

The success of reconstruction in the South carried with it the
ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the requisite number of
States. The result was duly certified by Mr. Seward as Secretary of
State, on the twenty-eighth day of July, 1868, and the Amendment was
thenceforward a part of the organic law of the nation. It had been
carried, from first to last, as a party measure--unanimously supported
by the Republicans, unanimously opposed by the Democrats. Its grand
and beneficent provisions failed to attract the vote of a single
Democratic member in any State Legislature in the whole Union.
Wherever the Democrats were in majority the Legislature rejected it,
and in every Legislature where the Republicans had control the
Democrats in minority voted against it. Not only was this true, but
the States of Ohio and New Jersey, which had ratified it in 1866-67
when their Legislatures were Republican, formally voted in 1868, when
the Democrats had come into power, to recall their assent to the
Amendment and to record thei