A clear line will be drawn by the historian between the war administration of the President who upheld the Union and the dismal epoch of Southern reconstruction which followed—an epoch of unconstitutional Congressional despotism, mitigated only from time to time by the personal authority of General Grant. The story of the relations of General Grant as President of the United States with the party which found itself compelled to take advantage of his unbounded popularity as the surest means of retaining its grasp upon authority at Washington will one day constitute a most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of government, but it lies outside the scope of this paper. That General Grant would gladly have co-operated with President Lincoln in carrying out his plan of re-establishing the Union on Democratic and constitutional lines may be inferred not only from the fact which he has stated, that the only vote he ever cast before the civil war was for a Democratic President, but from the more significant fact that he was so fully convinced of the readiness of the Southern States to accept the results of the civil war in good faith, that, immediately after the accession of President Johnson in 1865, he urged upon the President the importance of throwing a combined army of Union and of Confederate soldiers into Mexico for the purpose of expelling the French under Bazaine, and compelling Maximilian to abandon the hopeless attempt to found an empire in the land of the Montezumas which eventually cost that gallant but unfortunate prince his life. President Johnson eagerly adopted General Grant’s suggestion, but the Secretary of State Mr. Seward, opposed it, and Mr. Seward’s objection was fatal. “It cost Maximilian his life,” General Grant tells us, “and gave Napoleon the Third five more years of power in France.” He might have added that it cost the people of the Southern States ten years of the most odious and corrupting mal-administration recorded in modern history—mal-administration which, but for the solid political capacity and the traditional common sense and patriotism of the Americans of the Southern States, must have reduced the fairest portion of the North American continent to a social and industrial chaos without precedent in the annals of modern civilisation. The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all directions North and South, cropping out in organised official peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever for a moment be tolerated by the American people. * * * * *