The country was truly in a dangerous condition; a portion of the Northern population were in favor of General Grant and his policy, and the rest were in favor of a change in the South. A house divided against itself will not stand: at least, it will not stand long. Men even deserted the grand Republican party, not for any ill it had done, but simply because others deserted it. It was even charged against the Grant administration that it was responsible for the ruin of the Republican government in the Southern States, and even for the great business disasters that had overtaken the whole country, North and South. It is easy to find a stick to beat a dog. Such puerile charges remind me rather of the tricks of children than actions of men. All those charges were entirely false, and the Democrats, both North and South, must have known it themselves. We still remember well the mischief that President Andrew Johnson did in his great sympathy for the rebels after they had laid down their arms, and how the Southern States had been ruled by hands far too weak for the task; that is, by colored men, formerly unaccustomed to politics, by scalawags and carpet-baggers. The cleverest of the rebels refused to lend a hand in the work of Reconstruction, and sat sullenly at home nursing their wrath to keep it warm. They never moved a hand in the work of building up their own country, till they moved as the Ku-Klux-Klan, reached for the shot-gun, and murdered those who ruled the Southern States. The rebel legislatures were now made up of those very men whom the North had put down in the war. They thronged the State halls and corridors, dressed in the very same robes that they had worn on the battle-field when we were fighting for the Union and freedom: and they were as rebellious in heart as before! There was one great man in the Republican party who might have done a great deal for the colored people of the South, if he had tried, but he did not try; nay, he himself wanted to be President, and did not wish to hurt himself when his own selfish interests were at stake. This man was the Hon. James G. Blaine, of Maine. He opposed the Force Bill, and lost no opportunity of opposing President Grant’s administration whenever the latter wished to do anything against the late rebels, and in favor of the people. But Mr. Blaine never became President, and it served him right, for he might have proved a bad one, as Andrew Johnson did.