of correcting them. What is strictly its war policy, we heartily approve and earnestly support; but its political measures for regaining the people of the seceded states, and reconciling them to the Union, are, in our judgment, to a great extent illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, revolutionary, and unnecessary. The president, as the executive chief of the nation, has, we hold, in time of insurrection or invasion, the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and therefore we do not complain of what are called "arbitrary arrests." We do not say that all those who have been arrested deserved to be, but we are confident that very few of those who really deserve to be have been arrested. Justice has not always, and injustice sometimes may have been done; but the constitution has not been violated by the arrests complained of. The violation of the constitution we complain of, is in the manner in which the president is reorganizing state authority in the seceded states. This he is doing by means of a few friends of the government, principled or unprincipled, got together in a seceded state under a military governor appointed by the executive, and authorized to wield the whole representative and electoral power the state was entitled to as a state in the Union. Already the president has created two senators for Virginia, and we hear it rumored that Texas is to be divided into four states, and that will be a creation of ten additional senators. The same process may be carried on in all the seceded states, and the president create for himself, or endow creatures of his own with, nearly one-half of the electoral and representative power of the United States. All that is needed is to obtain a military footing in a state, and get together a few dozens of individuals who, under the protection of the federal guns, will consent to meet and resolve themselves the state, and that forthwith the president and congress recognize it as a state in the Union, and admit its senators and representatives to their seats. Against this we protest in the name of the constitution, of legal government, of social order, common honesty, and common sense. But our protest will avail nothing. The house of representatives has just admitted Western Virginia as a state, after listening to the able and conclusive speech of Mr. Conway against it.

Yet the error was not so much in admitting the new state, as in the previous recognition of the Pierrepont government as the state of Virginia. That government was not and is not Virginia, and had and has no power to give the con

sent required by the constitution for the formation of a new state within the limits of the old state of Virginia. That pretence was well exposed in the debate in the house by Mr. Stevens. But Mr. Stevens himself erred in contending that Western Virginia could be admitted under the war power. The war power is neither unconstitutional nor revolutionary. Under it the government could take possession of Virginia, and govern it by a military governor, but could not create a state, or admit a state into the Union, for a state in the Union is a part of the Union, and is not under the government, either civil or military, of the Union. It is, united with the other states, the national sovereign, and governs instead of being governed. But the state of Virginia, having seceded, had ceased to exist, and the territory of Virginia had lapsed to the United States, the national sovereign. It was, after secession, simply territory belonging to the Union and under its jurisdiction, and could be dealt with as any other territory belonging to the United States. It was competent for congress, if it chose, to erect it into two or more territorial governments, and to admit them with a republican constitution, freely adopted by the people of each, into the Union as states, with or without an enabling act.

The complaint we make of the administration is, not that it establishes in the several seceded states military governments, but that it treats these governments which it creates, and which depend on the federal government, as states in the Union. This is revolution and usurpation. It allows them the representative and electoral power of states, to which, being at best nothing but territorial governments, they are not entitled. It vitiates the national sovereignty itself. We pray congress, therefore, to refrain from going any further, and when the respectable gentlemen we hear have been elected by the military government of Louisiana, present themselves with Governor Shepley's credentials, it will permit them to withdraw. This it may do, because it is always lawful to correct our own errors; and because Governor Pierrepont, after all, was chosen by popular election, though illegal, while Governor Shepley was simply appointed by the federal executive.

Still, we repeat, the administration, in its war policy, must be sustained, if we would sustain the national cause. It is the legal, constitutional government of the country, and cannot, during its term of office, be separated from the coun

try. We have full confidence in its patriotic intentions; we give it credit for a great deal of ability, though not of the highest sort; and we doubt not that it will, after a manner, carry us through our present difficulties, though not precisely in what we regard as the best manner. We dislike all finesse, intrigue, and underground working. We prefer always an open, frank, manly course, and are never willing to gain even a good end by reprehensible means. We would rather fail in the right than succeed in the wrong. We honor only him who seeks noble ends by noble means. We like and support the end the administration aims at. We do not like all the means it adopts, for some of them seem to us unconstitutional, and fitted only to corrupt public virtue. But while we are writing the decisive battle may be raging, and before we issue from the press, the fate of the Union may be decided. It is an anxious moment for all Americans who love their country. Yet our country's destiny, as our own, is in the hands of God, who rears or overthrows states and empires at his will. In him we put our trust, confident that whatever he does, he does right. Thy will be done.

CATHOLICS AND THE ANTI-DRAFT RIOTS.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1863.]

FROM the fact that the immediate actors in the late riots in New York, got up to resist the draft, and to create a diversion in favor of the southern rebellion, were almost exclusively Irishmen and Catholics, efforts have been made, and most likely will continue to be made, to excite the hostility of the non-Catholic American people not only against the foreign, especially the Irish element in our population, but against the Catholic religion itself. Non-Catholics judge the national and political bearings of the church by the conduct of her members themselves, and, if in a moment of national crisis, when the nation is struggling for life, against one of the most formidable rebellions in any age or country, these are found acting directly or indirectly against the nation, and giving aid and comfort to the rebels, they will be very likely to infer that there is something in

Catholicity itself unfavorable to loyalty, or incompatible with national sovereignty and independence.

The standing charge of non-Catholic Americans against our religion is that it is subject to a foreign power, and hostile to free government; that Catholics are not, and as good Catholics cannot be, loyal to our free popular institutions; and that in a struggle of the nation to maintain its existence and independence against either a foreign or a domestic foe, they will be found as a body on the side of the enemy. This charge, false and unjust as it is, many will think, and more will pretend, has been confirmed rather than refuted by the attitude of Catholics during the present civil war, and especially by their participation in the late disgraceful and disloyal riots against the draft, in this city and elsewhere. That these riots were intended to coöperate with the rebel general Lee in his invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and to weaken and overthrow the government by preventing it from obtaining the forces necessary to crush out the rebellion, there is and can be no serious doubt. It is certain, also, that nearly nine-tenths of the active rioters were Irishmen and Catholics. It is, no doubt, true that few, if any, respectable Irishmen, and few, or none, of the better class of Catholics were found actually rioting. The active participators in mobs are usually from the lowest and most degraded social class, even when instigated by men of high social standing. But it is still true, that the mobs were composed principally of Irishmen and Catholics, and of Catholics, too, who were not wholly beyond the reach of the clergy. They were not all of the abandoned, vicious, or vagabond class, who never hear mass, and are at times utterly heedless of their religion. Bad as they were, they were within the pale of the church, and under the charge of the clergy. This was evinced by the influence the clergy had in dispersing them, and by the . personal impunity in every instance, except one, with which the clergy went about among them, and snatched from their hands the bludgeons with which they were armed. No, they were not all a hardened and vicious rabble, whom the clergy could not reach or influence, and utterly heedless of the obligations of religion. They were rather a rabble the clergy had neglected, had never labored to instruct, or to bring more directly and completely under religious influences, and for whose conduct, savage as it was, the clergy and their most reverend chief of this city are not wholly

irresponsible. Moreover, those rioters only acted out the opinions they had received from men of higher religious and social positions than themselves; and if the general tone of the clergy and respectable Catholics of the city, and especially of the Catholic press, had been decidedly opposed to the rebellion, or heartily in favor of sustaining the administration in its efforts to suppress it by military force, we may be very sure that the riot either never would have occurred, or that the chief actors in it would have been neither Irishmen nor Catholics. Non-Catholics are aware of this, and we Catholics gain nothing by not frankly avowing it.

Yet the riot was not a Catholic riot, and gives, in reality, no confirmation to the standing charge against the Catholic Church. It may prove that all Catholics are not what they should be, and that even our clergy may have been remiss in their duty to instruct and look after the morals of their people, especially the poorer and more exposed classes; but not that the church is disloyal, or incompatible with republican freedom, or national unity and independence. These rioters did not fill our city with horror at their savage deeds in their capacity as Catholics, or as Irishmen. It was not by command of the church or as Catholics that they resisted the draft, attacked the officers of government appointed to carry it into effect, made demonstrations against the Republican presses of the city, burned down the houses of prominent Republican officials, destroyed the Colored Orphan Asylum, murdered negroes, and rifled and demolished their dwellings. These things they did not as Catholics or Irishmen, but as adherents of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY, as partisans of Horatio Seymour, Fernando Wood, James Brooks, Clement L. Vallandigham, and others, who, by their incendiary speeches and by leading articles in the Democratic journals, had for months been exciting them against the government, against the conscription, against the war, and had worked them up to uncontrollable fury. The shouts of the mob tell us what was its animus, and under what influence or inspiration it acted, and these were hurrahs for Governor Seymour, Fernando Wood, General McClellan, and Jeff. Davis. A Catholic layman or an Irishman known to be a Republican or a supporter of the administration, was in no less danger from the mob than a Protestant, a native American, or even a negro. Colonel O'Brien, so savagely murdered, was an Irishman and a