It is certainly true that full freedom implies civil liberty and civil equality, but there was another way, and a better way, to have secured these than by the immediate and universal suffrage of the newly emancipated in all their ignorance, immorality and poverty, and that was by the nationalization of civil liberty, and its protection and enforcement by the United States courts. Most of the {218} Republicans believed, at that moment, that that had been secured by the Fourteenth Amendment; and there can be little question that a very important consideration with such was the fear that after Reconstruction should be accomplished, the Southern "States" might amend negro suffrage out of their "State" constitutions, and thus destroy the Republican party in these "States," unless the Constitution of the United States should be so amended as to prevent it. The most radical among them were no doubt moved chiefly by the extravagant humanitarianism of the period, which had developed in their minds to the point of justifying not only the political equality of the races, but the political superiority, at least in loyalty to the Union, the Constitution and republican government, of the uncivilized negroes over the whites of the South; but that this conviction was not very strong among the masses of them can be readily concluded from the fact that that party is to-day the party which is following the European idea of the duty of civilized races to impose their political sovereignty upon uncivilized, or half civilized, or not fully civilized, races anywhere and everywhere in the world. No party can, in so short a time, so completely change its fundamental principle of political ethics when it is really and conscientiously believed in by the masses of the party. [Sidenote: Johnson's retirement from the presidency.] This proposed Fifteenth Amendment was not sent to the President for his approval, but went, according to custom, to the Secretary of State, to be submitted to the "State" legislatures. The President was now within a very few days of the end of his term. His sun had fairly set, and the disrespect felt for him by the members of the dominant party in Congress and out of Congress was expressed in the rude and quite unprecedented refusal of General Grant to sit in the same carriage with him in the {219} procession from the White House to the Capitol, on the 4th of March, for the ceremonies of the inauguration of the new President. Discredited, despised, and scoffed at, as a traitor to his party, to his political creed, and to his country, Mr. Johnson stepped down from the high office which he had occupied during one of the two most critical periods in American history since the establishment of the present Constitution. [Sidenote: The President and the Republican party.]