dowed by nature with all the elements of agricultural and commercial prosperity, from being turned into a desert. But no foreign interference can longer delay the collapse and disruption of the Ottoman State. These disorders and revolts are not the disease of the community, but the symptoms only. The malady itself is seated deeper, is altogether cureless. The day is not far distant, we are certain, when the European dominions of the Sultan will be partitioned out among Christian States. It would be a bold thing to anticipate that distribution; but it will probably be affect ed by the revolution, which has excluded Austria from Germany. Bosnia, Servia, and Turkish Croatia will probably gravitate to that new Empire" which will have its centre at Pesth." Roumania will grasp Bulgaria, and, firmly fixed on the mouths of the Danube, may consolidate into a strong Power. To the share of Greece will fall the splendid country to the south of the Balkan range, the islands of the Egean, and the city of Constantine itself. The Turkish Power will cross the Bosphorus to its true home, where it still preponderates in number, in faith, in the elements of a national life. From the Spectator, 15th September. PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE NEW ORLEANS MASSACRE. We have never thought President Johnson a bad man. - only a man of violent and hasty passions, illiterate not only from neglected education, but from that imperious and uneandid temper which prefers to wrench the facts to suit its own views, instead of adopting its own views to the facts, and therefore incapable of perceiving the true issue which is still pending between North and South. Nothing worse than this we impute to him. No one can doubt for a moment that he believes his present blind, mischievous, and ignorant policy to be truly patriotic, nor that, even if he be guilty of a yet greater act of violence than any he has yet committed, and were actually to break up by force the present incomplete Congress on the ground that it will not admit unconditionally the delegates from the lately rebellious States, he would be guilty of this act of insanity, sincerely believing that he was discharging his duty to his country and it its Constitution. The danger of his present policy lies in its ignorant sincerity. Wilier and falser men no doubt are pulling the strings which govern the President's actions, but he unquestionably believes sincerely what he proclaims so coarsely, that his political opponents, the Republicans, are the determined enemies of true national unity. We have just obtained, however, a completer and most instructive light on the real bias of the President's passions, and the true drift of that policy which his admirers in this country tell us seriously is the policy most likely to secure justice for the negro, as well as reconciliation between North and South. The official correspondence concerning the New Orleans massacre has at length been forced out of the reluctant hands of the President by the universal cry of the public. It was delayed, and what is worse, General Sheridan's report upon was officially garbled when first published, in order perhaps that it might not cripple the hands of the party of Compromise in the recent Philadelphia Convention. The New York Times, the organ of Mr. Raymond, who is now heart and soul with the President, received, as it says itself, direct from him, a copy of the most important of General Sheridan's despatches, in which the whole of a paragraph censuring in the most unmeasured terms the murderous conduct of the New Orleans municipal police "Monroe's Thugs"-and their vile Mayor, Mr. Monroe himself, as the authors and immediate agents of the massacre, was omitted without notice of the omission. The effect of this was that General Sheridan's blame appeared to fall as much upon the freesoil party as upon their opponents, while in fact they received but the lightest part of it, and all his horror was reserved for the ex-Secessionist murderers. however, we have the whole story fully before us, and as it is a most convincing refutation of the foolish assertion, believed so widely in England by those who study American politics as filtered through the Times alone, that the President's Southern policy is just to all, as well as forgiving and conciliatory to the South, let us tell it in the form in which it is now reluctantly admitted, even by the most unscrupulous advocates of the passionate and ignorant man who wields for the present the whole power of the Executive over the whole area of the great North American continent. On the 28th July, two days before the massacre, Mr. Johnson telegraphed thus to Governor Wells, whom he himself recognizes, we must remember, as the legal Gov Now, "ANDREW JOHNSON." This despatch of the President, received on To this Governor Wells replied, stating that the very day of the riot, was considered he had not convened the Convention, that justly enough by the ex-Secessionist party this had been done by the President of the as an order that the military were to take Convention of 1864, and that he himself part with them in putting down the Conhad only named the day for the elections. vention, and not to impede them. But they On the same day the ex-Secessionists tele- wished for no military aid. They knew too graphed to the President that they believed well that the Federal troops would not perall these preparations for the adjourned mit a massacre. All they wished was to Convention illegal, that the party in favour have all military aid withheld, and to be let of it were violently hostile to the President, loose themselves. Accordingly, as Genethat they themselves wished to move the ral Sheridan tells us in his very graphic whole matter before the grand jury in order despatches, Mayor Monroe's " Thugs," to determine its legality, but that it would the expression is General Sheridan's, not be impossible to execute civil process' ours, that is, police selected specially by without certainty of a riot, and asked the Mayor for their violent and unscruwhether the military were to be allowed to pulous character, some of them, says Geneinterfere. The President telegraphed back ral Sheridan, being murderers, followed that the military would interfere to support the procession of the members of the Conthe action of the local Court (fiercely anti-vention into the Mechanics' Institute, the freedmen). At the same time General building where they met, and there began Baird, who was in command in the absence the massacre, firing through the windows of General Sheridan, telegraphed to the upon them. A white flag was then held out Secretary-at-War (Mr. Stanton) that the from one of the windows, and thereupon Convention, with the sanction of Governor the police rushed into the building, and Wells, was to meet on Monday, 30th July, then, in General Sheridan's words, " opened that the city authorities thought it unlawful, an indiscriminate fire upon the audience till and preferred to break it up by arresting they had emptied their revolvers, when they the delegates, that he himself had declared retired, and those inside barricaded the it impossible to prejudge the matter in that doors. The doors were broken open and way or to interfere without some express the firing again commenced," and those instructions, which he requested the Secretary-at-War to send. To this Mr. Stanton, who probably wholly differed from the President, does not appear to have replied. In the meantime the President had telegraphed to the most active of the ex-Secessionists, Mr. Andrew J. Herron, the Attorney-General of New Orleans, Louisiana, an order to demand aid from the military to put down the Convention, which he assumed on his own ipse dixit, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, but against the view of the legal Governor of the State, to be illegal: who escaped through doors or windows were fired upon as they came out by the "Thugs," and again by the New Orleans citizens, in the outer circle, as they passed them. "Many of them, wounded and taken prisoners, and others who were prisoners and not wounded, were fired upon by their captors and citizens." General Sheridan is no friend of the Free-soil Convention. He speaks of the leaders as violent and dangerous men. But he cannot disguise his loathing for Mayor Monroe and those municipal authorities to whom President Johnson had telegraphed that the military were to support them. and was it armed for the purpose of sustaining tionary proceedings ? the Convention in its usurpation and revoluHave any arms been taken from persons since the 30th ult. who were supposed or known to be connected with this mob? Have not various individuals been assaulted and shot by persons connected with this mob, without good cause, and in violation of the public peace and good order? Was not the assembling of this Convention and the gathering of the mob for its defence and protection a main cause of the riotous and unlawful proceedings of the civil authorities of New Orleans? Have steps been taken by the civil authorities to arrest and try any and all those who were engaged in this riot, and those who have committed offences, in violation of law? Can ample justice be meted by the civil authorities to all offenders against the law? General Sheridan please furnish me a brief reply to above inquiries, with such other information as he may be in possession of? Please answer by telegraph at your earliest con Will Hitherto not various individuals been insulted and shot we have quoted from General Sheridan's by persons connected with this mob, without lengthened and maturely considered report good cause, and in violation of the public peace Was not the mob assembled, of 6th August, sent in answer to a series of and good order? leading questions by the President, the drift of which was to extort from General Sheridan some extenuation of the conduct of the police and the Mayor for the horrible massacre of which they were guilty. In his first short, sharp account of it, sent by telegraph on the 2nd of August, General Sheridan said simply, "It was no riot, it was an absolute massacre by the police which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort Pillow." This was very unpleasant for the President, who had himself positively telegraphed to the real agents, those who pulled the strings of this bloody affair, that the military were to support the civil authorities now found guilty of deliberate massacre. Of course he had no idea of what would happen. Had the military been on the spot indeed, the massacre would never have taken place. But Mr. Johnson's New Orleans friends knew this pervenience. fectly well, and had taken care to use his authority only to prevent the military from interfering on the other side, asserting their complete ability to put down the Convention without their aid. But Mr. Johnson, though innocent of course of any intention to instigate this horrible massacre, felt truly enough that it was his emphatic order that the civil authorities should be supported in putting down the convention which really caused it, and accordingly he telegraphed, as we have said, to General Sheridan, a series of leading questions, which could not have said more plainly than they did, "For God's sake find proof that the chief fault in this matter lay with the Convention, and not with the civil authorities whom I supported!" This was his judicial and impartial despatch: "By U. S. Military Telegraph. "EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, D.C., August 4, 1866. "To Major-General SHERIDAN, Commanding, &c., at New Orleans: "ANDREW JOHNSON, President of the United States." There is something quite piteous in this despatch. It is impossible to ask more pathetically for a justification of conduct which had been wholly and fearfully wrong. General Sheridan could not reply as Mr. Johnson wished. The whole account of the massacre from which we have quoted was given by him in answer to this letter. In effect the answer was, " The civil authorities whom you ordered the military not to oppose, but to support, were a set of mur derers," and General Sheridan added that the judges of New Orleans could not be in the least trusted to investigate the murders. One of the principal judges, he said, was one of the most dangerous characters in the city. - But the worst of the President's conduct, that part of it which seems to us criminal in the highest degree, is yet to come. After failing to extract from General Sheridan any judgment but the most emphatic, "We have been advised here that prior to the most horror-struck condemnation of his the assembling of the illegal and extinct Con- proteges, after learning that he had, unconvention elected in 1864, inflammatory and in-sciously no doubt, but still in the blindness surrectionary speeches were made by a mob of of his wilful trust in the ex-Secessionist white and coloured persons, urging upon them party, been abetting murderers of the worst to arm and equip themselves for the purpose of protecting and sustaining the Convention in its illegal and unauthorized proceedings, intended and calculated to upturn and supersede the existing State Government of Louisiana, which had been recognized by the Government of the United States. Further did the mob? Have dye, he yet wilfully pursued the same policy, and reinstated this Mayor Munroe, the chief cause of all these crimes, in his civil authority as Mayor of New Orleans. President's organ, the New York Times, admits that the evidence taken before the The Commission showed a preconcerted plot to massacre. "Several policemen," it says, "had reversed the bands on their hats in such a manner that the numbers could not be seen.""The Commission," it adds, " will probably be of opinion that the affair was a preconcerted movement, as the evidence shows that it was talked of by the citizens for days previous to its occurrence. It will be the opinion of the Commission that if the troops had not arrived just when they did, the riot would have progressed to the extermination of all the Unionists and the freedmen in the City." And the very paper which admits this, supports President Johnson enthusiastically in throwing Louisiana and all the Southern States into the full power of the men who plot these things. leader of the "Thugs" to be reinstated in his civil authority there, the murderers who had the excuse of war for their massacre should feel themselves absolved by him from their guilt and shout in his favour, while they plot the destruction of their Radical rivals in Tennessee. The President is simply blind and mad in his party zeal. He is sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind. He is trying to conciliate men whom he should crush, and to crush the men whom he should conciliate. If he is not beaten, as he will be, by the shrewd Northern Radicals, he will be forced into something like the lead of a new secession. From the Spectator, 15 Sept. ROME THREE MONTHS HENCE. It was on this day two years that the Emperor Napoleon and Victor Emanuel concluded, in the deepest secresy, that memorable instrument for regulating the future temporal estate of the Pope, without furnishing the latter with the faintest hint as to what was pending, which has since been periodically flourished by French diplomacy before the Pope, obtusely impassive to such remonstrances, much as a birch is significantly shaken from time to time at a stiffnecked schoolboy. The surprise created at the promulgation of this Convention, so completely without precedent in form and without antecedent to prepare people's minds for its coming, was only nat ural. Two years is a sufficiently long period to comprise many events. Many have happened in the two years now elapsed of an importance beyond what imagination ever could have contemplated, and yet here we are, arrived within three short months of To illustrate only the spirit in which this massacre has been received elsewhere in the South, we may cite the following horrible sentence from an Alabama paper, the Mobile Tribune, with regard to the New Orleans massacre. One of the victims massacred the other day at New Orleans was Dr. Dostie, a Unionist who heartily supported General Butler throughout his government of New Orleans, and on whose Poyalty and ability the General has just pronounced a warm panegyric. Of this man the Mobile Tribune said, with an insane brutality that sounds more like the spirit of a ghoul than of a human being, "Let Dostie's skin be forthwith stripped from his body, stuffed, and sold to Barnum - the proceeds to go to the Freedmen's Bureau and negro newspapers, to be used by them for the benefit of negroes who have no taste for work. Dostie's body will make good soap. Let him be boiled down, preparatory to being distributed in bars to Yankee 'school marms.' Delicious will be the kisses sipped by those angular females from ebony cheeks, late lathered with sweetscented Dostie." That is the very delirium of devilish fury. Yet in spite of all, Mr. the actual carrying out of the stipulations Johnson rabidly sustains the very party by whose instrumentality all this blood has been shed and all this foaming hatred is poured forth. It is a curious comment on the President's policy in Louisiana that at Memphis the meeting to support the Philadelphia Convention and the President took for two of its Vice-Presidents General Forrest, the butcher of Fort Pillow, and Recorder Creighton, who shouted to the Memphis mob "to kill every damned nigger." No wonder that when the President first supports the conspirators of New Orleans, and afterwards allows the chief murderer and in the above-said agreement without aught having happened, as was so freely anticipated at the time, to make it vanish like a dissolving view on approach of the fatal hour for execution. Certainly there has occurred nothing which can be taken as symptomatic of the intention attributed to the Emperor Napoleon, when first the Convention was proclaimed, to use it but as a blind for some special and private end. If his mind ever did run on such an idea, it must have long ago been abandoned, for here we are, at a few weeks' distance only from the culminating moment, without his St. Peter's successor at this moment; and yet, with the danger staring him in the face, all its occupant does is to sit quietly upon his chair with the lethargy of a Turk. It is true that this stupid indifference to realities is not the universal rule. There are men and ecclesiastics of high degree — who feel alive to the approach of a disagreeable time, and are quickened with uncomfortable sensations as to what might happen. These men, whose intellectual fibres are quivering with fear, furnish the most valuable ingredient in the constitution of the Court of Rome. They are its most enlightened minds, the edge of their wits being solely due to the sharpening power of personal fear. Under the impulse of nervous alarm at the gradual disappearance of all those landmarks whereon they had previously rested their faith without hesitation, these fluttered individuals are busily engaged in devising substitutes, for the most part one more foolish than the other. The catastrophe at Sadowa may be regarded as having first fully aroused them. Amidst the consternation produced by that crash, the remembrance that the term fixed by the Convention was not far off thrilled at last through the Vatican, when the Pope bethought himself of taking counsel on the conjuncture with a select number of Cardinals. We learn that at this conference of Princes of the Church the capital question was fully discussed what it behoved the Pope to do, when the moment came for his being actually left without that foreign military protection under whose shelter he has now reigned for seventeen Three possible courses suggested having indicated any wish to dispose of the accumulating reasons that must render his stay on at Rome more and more difficult as December approaches, reasons whose accumulation has been heaped up, so to speak, with his own direct connivance and participation. During the last two years there have been divers moments offering a ready pretext to the Emperor, if so minded, to draw nearer to the Pope, and show his disposition to free himself from the letter of his obligations as recorded in the Convention. The still pending negotiations for the quota of the Papal debt which Italy declared herself by that instrument ready to assume, might easily have furnished the opportunity for steps which the Court of Rome confidently expected, but which have never come about. Again, the war, with its supposed passing clouds between the Court of Florence and the Tuileries - Venetia not accepted at the hand of France, and Garibaldi's revolutionary element evoked much to the supposed distaste of the Imperialist Protector, never have for an instant operated in Rome in the manner which was there firmly anticipated. Vainly have the Prelates in their distress cried to Sister Anne, standing on tiptoe to descry the first dustwhirl of coming succour. Sister Anne has never had other word to reply to these Prelates but that no sign of help was in sight. It was of comparatively small consequence that such hallucinations should be persistently indulged in while the period for the departure of the French troops was still some distance off. As long as these remained, the foolishness of the Prelates was ren-years. dered practically harmless from the presence themselves - an understanding with Victor of a protection so superior in force as to re- Emanuel, flight from Rome, entire reliance press any public outburst of counter-irrita- for protection on France. The first is said tion by the sense of its hopelessness. But to have been at once pronounced as inadthe case will be very different after the 15th missible by all present, but the other two December, when the Papal authorities ideas found each warm champions. The stand face to face with an angry and inflam- notion of the Pope's going away into foreign mable population, especially irritated by the parts has been long the hobby of the extreme present monetary distress, and with merce- reactionary faction, and particularly of the nary regiments that are notoriously hateful Jesuits, although it would appear that there to the latter for their only defence. The was some difference of opinion amongst the prospect ahead is decidedly not smiling, Cardinals who advocated this plan, as to for however much the popular leaders may whether the Pope should betake himself to be determined to set their faces against any a place of residence in or out of France. tumult in the streets, it is impossible to over- But the proposal which seems to have atlook the fact that Papal Rome is in the posi-tracted most attention, and whose chief tion of a man who is deliberately going spokesman is said to have been Cardinal blindfold into a jungle beset with dangers. Altieri, was for the Pope to fling himself The situation is honeycombed with perils. outright into the arms of France, and therePopular irritation is an element whose by to impose upon the Emperor Napoleon force it is hard to gauge and define. If the duties of a Protector. The conception ever a throne stood on a volcano it would is exactly in character with the kind of seem to be the temporal Chair of State of stratagem pervading the whole scheme of |
