Partisans of the Presidential “policy” are in the habit of declaring it a continuation of the policy of the martyred Lincoln. This is a mistake. Would that he could rise from his bloody shroud to repel the calumny! Happily, he has left his testimony behind, in words which all who have ears to hear can hear. The martyr presented the truth bodily, when he said, in suggestive metaphor, that we must “build up from the sound materials”; but his successor insists upon building from materials rotten with treason and gaping with rebellion. On another occasion, the martyr said that “an attempt to guaranty and protect a _revived_ State government, constructed in whole or _in preponderating part_ from _the very element_ against whose hostility and violence it is to be protected, is _simply absurd_.”[64] But this is the very thing the President is now attempting. He is constructing State governments, not merely in preponderating part, but _in whole_, from the hostile element. Therefore he departs openly from the policy of the martyred Lincoln. The martyr says to his successor that the policy adopted is “simply absurd.” He is right, although he might say more. Its absurdity is too apparent. It is as if, in abolishing the Inquisition, the inquisitors had been continued under another name, and Torquemada had received a fresh license for cruelty. It is as if King William, after the overthrow of James the Second, had made the infamous Jeffreys Lord Chancellor. Common sense and common justice cry out against the outrage; and yet this is the Presidential “policy” now so passionately commended to the American people. A state, according to Aristotle, is a “copartnership,” and I accept the term as especially applicable to our government. And now the President, in the exercise of the One Man Power, decrees that communities lately in rebellion shall be taken at once into our “copartnership.” I object to the decree as dangerous to the Republic. I am not against pardon, clemency, or magnanimity, except where they are at the expense of good men. I trust that they will always be practised; but I insist that recent rebels shall not be admitted, without proper precautions, to the business of the firm. And I insist also that the One Man Power shall not be employed to force them into the firm. * * * * *