With savage energy the Great Commoner pressed to trial the first impeachment of a President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanours.

His bill to confiscate the property of the Southern people was already pending on the calendar of the House. This bill was the most remarkable ever written in the English language or introduced into a legislative body of the Aryan race. It provided for the confiscation of ninety per cent. of the land of ten great States of the American union. To each negro in the South was allotted forty acres from the estate of his former master, and the remaining millions of acres were to be divided among the “loyal who had suffered by reason of the Rebellion.”

The execution of this, the most stupendous crime ever conceived by an English lawmaker, involving the exile and ruin of millions of innocent men, women, and children, could not be intrusted to Andrew Johnson.

No such measure could be enforced so long as any man was President and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy who claimed his title under the Constitution. Hence the absolute necessity of his removal. 153

The conditions of society were ripe for this daring enterprise.

Not only was the Ship of State in the hands of revolutionists who had boarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among them swarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured in the story of a nation.

The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake, thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hired courtesans.

The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, had confiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the South during the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. The Treasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of its name with which to seize alleged “property of the Confederate Government.” The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimed and crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold—a capital sufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road to prosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation, guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment of vaster schemes of legal confiscation.

The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of gigantic frauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.

Above them all towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind had organized the Crédit Mobilier steal. This vast infamy had already eaten its way into 154 the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustrious men.

So open had become the shame that Stoneman was compelled to increase his committees in the morning, when a corrupt majority had been bought the night before.

He arose one day, and looking at the distinguished Speaker, who was himself the secret associate of Oakes Ames, said:

“Mr. Speaker: while the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among our wheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be lost, have, perhaps by the power of argument alone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member from Connecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase the Committee to twelve.”

Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president’s chair for his part with those thieves, increased his Committee.

Everybody knew that “the power of argument alone” meant ten thousand dollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on the floor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.

A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of the Executive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while the currency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.

The statute books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopoly on generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires were voted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millions 155 fixed as a charge upon the people and their children’s children.

The demoralization incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt, which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone to its life.

Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of its social and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to an honourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a negro electorate controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets unchallenged and unmolested.

A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American Democracy.

A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-places of a few families and cherished as relics of the past.

Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the Almighty Dollar. The new altar was covered 156 with a black mould of human blood—but no questions were asked.

A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and received his guests with condescension.

In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the South approached its climax.

The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralyzed. Two years after the close of a victorious war the credit of the Republic dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for seventy-three cents on the dollar.

The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in the White House.

A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the union of the fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the Nation. Members of Lincoln’s first Cabinet, protesting Senators and Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of famous negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall,............