the States, when all that Congress proposes is simply to recognize the actual condition of the States and to undertake their temporary government, by providing for the condition of political syncope into which they have fallen, and, during this interval, to substitute its own constitutional powers for the unconstitutional powers of the Rebellion. Of course, therefore, Congress will blot no star from the flag, nor will it obliterate any State liabilities. But it will seek, according to its duty, in the best way, to maintain the great and real sovereignty of the Union, by upholding the flag unsullied, and by enforcing everywhere within its jurisdiction the supreme law of the Constitution.

At the close of an argument already too long drawn out, I shall not stop to array the considerations of reason and expediency in behalf of this jurisdiction; nor shall I dwell on the inevitable influence that it must exercise over Slavery, which is the motive of the Rebellion. To my mind nothing can be clearer, as a proposition of constitutional law, than that everywhere within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government Slavery is impossible. The argument is as brief as it is unanswerable. Slavery is so odious that it can exist only by virtue of positive law, plain and unequivocal; but no such words can be found in the Constitution. Therefore Slavery is impossible within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government. For many years I have had this conviction, and have constantly maintained it. I am glad to believe that it is implied, if not expressed, in the Chicago Platform. Mr. Chase, among our public men, is known to accept it sincerely. Thus Slavery in the Territories is unconstitutional; but if the Rebel territory falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government, then Slavery will be impossible there. In a legal and constitutional sense, it will die at once. The air will be too pure for a slave. I cannot doubt that this great triumph has been already won. The moment that the States fell, Slavery fell also; so that,

even without any Proclamation of the President, Slavery had ceased to have a legal and constitutional existence in every Rebel State.

But even if we hesitate to accept this important conclusion, which treats Slavery within the Rebel States as already dead in law and Constitution, it cannot be doubted, that, by the extension of the Congressional jurisdiction over the Rebel States, many difficulties will be removed. Holding every acre of soil and every inhabitant of these States within its jurisdiction, Congress can easily do, by proper legislation, whatever may be needful within Rebel limits in order to assure freedom and to save society. The soil may be divided among patriot soldiers, poor-whites, and freedmen. But above all things, the inhabitants may be saved from harm. Those citizens in the Rebel States, who, throughout the darkness of the Rebellion, have kept their faith, will be protected, and the freedmen will be rescued from hands that threaten to cast them back into Slavery.

But this jurisdiction, which is so completely practical, is grandly conservative also. Had it been early recognized that Slavery depends exclusively upon the local government, and that it falls with that government, who can doubt that every Rebel movement would have been checked? Tennessee and Virginia would never have stirred; Maryland and Kentucky would never have thought of stirring. There would have been no talk of neutrality between the Constitution and the Rebellion, and every Border State would have been fixed in its loyalty. Let it be established in advance, as an inseparable incident to every Act of Secession, that it is not only impotent against the Constitution of the United States, but that, on its occurrence, both soil and inhabitants will lapse beneath the jurisdiction of Congress, and no State will ever again pretend to secede. The word "territory," according to an old and quaint etymology, is said to come from terreo, to terrify, because it was a bulwark against the enemy. A scholiast tells us, "Territorium est quic

quid hostis terrendi causâ constitutum," "A territory is something constituted in order to terrify the enemy." But I know of no way in which our Rebel enemy would have been more terrified than by being told that his course would inevitably precipitate him into a territorial condition. Let this principle be adopted now, and it will contribute essentially to that consolidation of the Union which was so near the heart of Washington.

The necessity of this principle is apparent as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States, whether against Union men or against freedmen. Union men in Virginia already tremble at the thought of being delivered over to a State government wielded by original Rebels pretending to be patriots. But the freedmen, who have only recently gained their birthright, are justified in a keener anxiety, lest it should be lost as soon as won. Mr. Saulsbury, a Senator from Delaware, with most instructive frankness, has announced, in public debate, what the restored State governments will do. Assuming that the local governments will be preserved, he predicts that in 1870 there will be more slaves in the United States than there were in 1860, and then unfolds the reason as follows, - all of which will be found in the "Congressional Globe"*:

"By your acts you attempt to free the slaves. You will not have them among you. You leave them where they are. Then what is to be the result?-II I presume that local State governments will be preserved. If they are, if the people have a right to make their own laws, and to govern themselves, they will not only reënslave every person that you attempt to set free, but they will reënslave the whole race."

Nor has the horrid menace of reënslavement proceeded from the Senator from Delaware alone. It has been uttered even by Mr. Willey, the mild Senator from Virginia, speaking in the name of

Thirty-Seventh Congress, Second Session, 2d May, 1862, Part III. p. 1923.

State Rights. Newspapers have taken up and repeated the revolting strain. That is to say, no matter what may be done for Emancipation, whether by Proclamation of the President, or by Congress even, the State, on resuming its place in the Union, will, in the exercise of its sovereign power, reënslave every colored person within its jurisdiction; and this is the menace from Delaware, and even from regenerated Western Virginia! I am obliged to Senators for their frankness. If I needed any additional motive for the urgency with which I assert the power of Congress, I should find it in the pretensions thus savagely proclaimed. In the name of Heaven, let us spare no effort to save the country from this shame, and an oppressed people from this additional outrage !

"Once free, always free." This is a rule of law, and an instinct of humanity. It is a self-evident axiom, which only tyrants and slave-traders have denied. The brutal pretension thus flamingly advanced, to reënslave those who have been set free, puts us all on our guard. There must be no chance or loop-hole for such an intolerable, Heaven-defying iniquity. Alas! there have been crimes in human history; but I know of none blacker than this. There have been acts of baseness; but I know of none more utterly vile. Against the possibility of such a sacrifice we must take a bond which cannot be set aside, and this can be found only in

the powers of Congress.

Congress has already done much. Besides its noble Act of Emancipation, it has provided that every person guilty of treason, or of inciting or assisting the Rebellion, "shall be disqualified to hold any office under the United States." And by another act, it has provided that every person elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the Government of the United States shall, before entering upon its duties, take an oath “that he has not voluntarily borne arms against the United States, or given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility thereto,

or sought or accepted or attempted to exercise the functions of any office whatever under any authority, or pretended authority, in hostility to the United States." This oath will be a bar against the return to National office of any who have taken part with the Rebels. It shuts out in advance the whole criminal gang. But these same persons, rejected by the National Government, are left free to hold office in the States. And here is another motive to further action by Congress. The oath is well as far as it goes; more must be done in the same spirit.

But enough. The case is clear. Behold the Rebel States in arms against that paternal government to which, as the supreme condition of their constitutional existence, they owe duty and love; ⚫ Act of Congress, July 2, 1862, ch. 123.

and behold all legitimate powers, executive, legislative, and judicial, in these States, abandoned and vacated. It only remains that Congress should enter and assume the proper jurisdiction. If we are not ready to exclaim with Burke, speaking of Revolutionary France, "It is but an empty space on the political map," we may at least adopt the response hurled back by Mirabeau, that this empty space is a volcano red with flames and overflowing with lava-floods. But whether we deal with it as empty space" or as "volcano," the jurisdiction, civil and military, centres in Congress, to be employed for the happiness, welfare, and renown of the American people,-changing Slavery into Freedom, and present chaos into a Cosmos of perpetual beauty and power.

The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by GEORGE LONG. London: Bell & Daldy.

DULNESS is usually reckoned the prescriptive right of kings; at least, they are supposed to be officially incapable of literary eminence. And yet it is a curious fact, that, of those idiomatic works which literature will not "let die," of those marked productions which survive by their individuality, three, at least, bear the impress of royal names.

Devotion has found, in the contributions of three thousand years, no utterance so fit as the lyrics of a Hebrew king; satiety has breathed no sigh so profound as "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King of Jerusalem "*; and the wisdom of the Stoics has no worthier exponent than the meditations of a sovereign who ruled the greatest empire known to history, and glorified it with his own im

Jewish tradition, in spite of German criticism, still ascribes the Book of Ecclesiastes to Solomon.

perial spirit, the noblest that ever bore the burden of state.

Our third example, unlike the other two, has not been adopted by ecclesiastical authority, and is not incorporated in any Vulgate of sacred lore; but its place in the canon of philosophy has long been established, and is often confirmed by fresh recognition. A new translation of this celebrated work, of which several versions already existed, has just been given to the English public by Mr. George Long, a well-known scholar and critic, with the title above named. We should have preferred the old title, "Meditations," so long endeared; but we are none the less grateful to Mr. Long for this needful service, for which no ordinary qualifications were required, and which has never before been performed by such competent hands.

Gibbon has said, that, "if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death

of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." This period comprises, together with the four concluding years of the first century of the Christian era, four-fifths of the second. The last of these fifths, deducting one year, (A.D. 161-180,) was occupied by the supreme rule of Annius Verus, better known by his assumed name of Marcus Elius Aurelius Antoninus, fifteenth emperor of the Romans, nephew and successor of another Antoninus, whose virtues, and especially his grateful remembrance of his predecessor and benefactor, procured him the agnomen of "Pius." In a line of sovereigns which numbers a larger proportion of wise and good men than most dynasties, perhaps than any other, M. Antoninus ranks first, so far as those qualities are concerned. A man of singular and sublime virtue, whose imperial station, so trying to human character, but served to render more conspicuous his rare and transcendent excellence. With an empire such as never before or since the Augustan dynasty has fallen to the lot of an individual, lord of the civilized earth, he lived simply and abstemiously as the poorest citizen in his dominions, frugal with unlimited means, humble with unlimited sway. Not a Christian by profession, in piety toward God and charity toward man he was yet a better Christian in fact than any of the Christian emperors who succeeded him. He governed his life by the Stoic discipline, the most hardy, in its practical requirements, of ancient systems, so rigor ous in its ethic that Josephus is proud to claim an affinity with it for the "straitest" of the Jewish sects, and so pure in its spirit that St. Jerome ranks its best-known writer as a Christian,—a philosophy which taught men to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all external things as indifferent. "His life," says Gibbon, "was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who had excited a rebellion in Syria, had by a voluntary death deprived him of the pleas ure of converting an enemy into a friend. War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defence called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns on the

frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century after his death there were many who preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among their household gods."

The learned Casaubon, after placing him above Solomon, "as being lord and master of more great kingdoms than Solomon was of towns," speaks of him as a man "who, for goodness and wisdom, was had by all men during his life in such honor and reputation as never man was either before him or after him." "There hath ever been store enough of men," he says, "that could speak well and give good instructions, but great want of them that could or so much as endeavored to do as they spake or taught others to do. Be it therefore spoken to the immortal praise and commendation of Antoninus, that as he did write so he did live. Never did writers so conspire to give all possible testimony of goodness, uprightness, innocence, as they have done to commend this one. They commend him, not as the best prince only, but absolutely as the best man and best philosopher that ever lived."

Merivale, who concludes with the reign of M. Antoninus his "History of the Romans under the Empire," adds his testimony to that of the cloud of witnesses who have trumpeted the great Imperator's praise. "Of all the Cæsars whose names are enshrined in the page of history, or whose features are preserved to us in the repositories of art, one alone seems still to haunt the Eternal City in the place and the posture most familiar to him in life. In the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which crowns the platform of the Campidoglio, Imperial Rome lives again. . . . . In this figure we behold an emperor, of all the line the noblest and the dearest, such as he actually appeared; we realize in one august exemplar the character and image of the rul ers of the world. We stand here face to face with a representative of the Scipios and Cæsars, the heroes of Tacitus and Livy. Our other Romans are effigies of the closet and the museum; this alone is a man of the streets, the forum, and the capitol. Such special prominence is well reserved, amid the wreck of ages, for him whom historians combine to honor as the worthiest of the Roman people."

Mr. Long, in his biographical introduction, examines at length the evidence for Marcus's alleged persecution of the Christians. Lardner, and other writers in the Christian ecclesiastical interest, assuming the fact, denounce it as a blot on the Emperor's fame. The translator devotes more space to the consideration of this matter than, perhaps, in the judgment of the historical critic at this day, it will seem to deserve. That Christians, in the time of M. Antoninus, in Asia Minor and in Gaul, suffered torture and death on account of their faith, admits of no reasonable doubt. That Marcus authorized these persecutions, in any sense implying the responsibility of an original decision, does not appear. The imperial power, it must be remembered, was not absolute, but constitutionally defined. The Augusti, for the most part, were but the executors of existing laws. The punishment of Christians, who refused to sacrifice, and persisted in contravening the religion of the State, was one of those laws. In some places, especially at Lyons and Vienne, the Christians were the victims of popular riots; but where they suffered by legal authority, in the name of the imperial government, it was under the well-known law of Trajan, a law which had been sixty years in operation when Marcus came upon the throne. The only blame that can be imputed to him in this relation (if blame it be) is that of failing to discern and acknowledge the divine authority of the new religion which was silently undermining the old Roman world. But no one who puts himself in the Emperor's time and place will think the worse of him for not adopting a view of this subject which educated and serious minds were precisely the least likely to adopt. To such, Christianity presented itself simply as a novelty opposed to religion and threatening the State. The case of Justin may be cited as an instance of a thought ful and philosophic mind embracing Christianity in spite of the strong presumption against it in minds of that class. But, not to speak of the very wide difference between the steady, conservative Roman and the volatile Greek, all the life-circumstances of Justin, a Palestinian by birth, favored his adoption of the Christian faith; everything in the life of Antoninus tended in the opposite direction. Justin embraced the religion first on its philosophic side,

where Antoninus was especially fortified against it, having early come to an understanding with himself on the deepest questions of the soul. His decisions on these questions did not differ materially from those of the Gospel; they might, unknown to himself, have been modified by a subtile atmospheric influence derived from that source and acting on a nature so receptive of its spirit. But the very fact, that he had in a measure anticipated the teachings of the Gospel, precluded the chance of his being surprised into acquiescence with the new religion by its moral beauty, if brought fairly before him, which perhaps it never was; for it does not appear that he read the Christian apologies framed in his day. What was best in Christianity, as a system of doctrine, its ethical precepts, he had already embraced; its substance he possessed; its external form he knew only as opposition to institutions which he was bound by all the sanctities of his office, by all the dignity of a Roman patrician, and by all the currents of his life, to uphold. For the rest, the relation of a mind like his to polytheism could be nothing more than the formal acceptance of its symbols in the interest of piety, implying no intellectual enslavement to its myths and traditions.

De Quincey calls attention to one merit of Antoninus, which, he says, has been "utterly unnoticed hitherto by historians, but which will hereafter obtain a conspicuous place in any perfect record of the steps by which civilization has advanced and human nature been exalted. It is this: Marcus Aurelius was the first great military leader who allowed rights indefeasible, rights uncancelled by misfortune in the field, to the prisoner of war. Others had been merciful and variously indulgent, upon their own discretion, and upon a random impulse, to some, or possibly to all of their prisoners; . . . . but Marcus Aurelius first resolutely maintained that certain indestructible rights adhered to every soldier simply as a man, which rights capture by the sword, or any other accident of war, could do nothing to shake or diminish. . . . . Here is an immortal act of goodness built upon an immortal basis; for so long as armies congregate and the sword is the arbiter of international quarrels, so long will it deserve to be had in remembrance that the first man who set limits to the empire