ter case a priori. One hundred and eighty-five votes in his favor are or will be transmitted to Washington, and have been cast by those who have received the proper certificates of election as having been chosen by the people of the several states. But the majority of the present House of Representatives,-who will have the election of the President in case it shall be decided prior to the 4th of March that there has been no choice by the people,—are of the opinion that Mr. Tilden has been elected, if any one has been; and that the vote of Louisiana, in particular, has been fairly cast. for him, as the face of the returns, before the rejection of the vote of certain parishes as terrorized, goes to show. And it seems likely that it will be decided by sharp parliamentary practice, whether Mr. Hayes or Mr. Tilden will be the next President.

Here, again, the friends of Mr. Hayes have the technical advantage on their side. The authors of the Constitution contemplated no such difficulty, and have made no provision to meet it. They merely provided that the vote should be opened by the President of the Senate in the presence of the two Houses and then counted; they vested the decision of doubtful points neither in one house nor in both. It is true, that a usage which never received constitutional sanction, has perhaps denied his right to exercise any judicial functions in such cases, and has vested the power to command him to reject any vote or votes not in the Senate, whose officer he is, but in either of the two houses acting separately. But at the present time, this usage has no legal authority, for the Democrats of the House, at the opening of the present Congress, failed to adopt the "Joint Rule," in which it was embodied, and these joint Rules expire as enactments with the termination of each Congress. There is therefore not a word in the Constitution or Laws of the United States to enable the House, or for that matter the Senate either, to exercise any control over the Republican President of the Senate. If the Senate has any power over him, it derives it from the recognized principle that the officers of a deliberative body are its organs and servants.

For this reason, it seems most probable that the election of Mr. Hayes will be proclaimed at the joint-session of the two Houses of Congress, and in that case, he will certainly be inaugurated President on the 4th of March next.

THE Submission of the Democrats to this decision under protest, is among the possibilities; indeed we think it extremely probable. Unless they can give such a direction to the course of events at Washington, as will put their antagonists in the attitude of assailants, they will probably prefer to accept the situation, rather than violently resist the decision given by those who have the technical right to decide. But that they mean to do everything short of resistance is evident from the manifesto issued by Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, Chairman of their National Committee.

The points upon which they rest their case are (1) That of the Republican electors of Oregon, only two have been certified by the Governor of that state, as the law requires, and that another elector, who possesses the Governor's certificate, has deposited his vote for Mr. Tilden. The electors of Oregon cannot be deprived of their right to suffrage by a failure on the part of its Governor to do his duty. If they could, he might have given Mr. Tilden the election by refusing to sign any certificate. And, as the Chief Justice of that state very properly points out, he is neither by law nor constitution vested with any judicial power to inquire into the qualifications of any elector. His business is to ascertain which electors received a majority of the legal votes cast by the people of the State, and to issue the certificate to them.

(2) If Congress can go behind the official certificate in the case of Oregon, it can do the same in the case of Louisiana. To this it may fairly be answered, that the rejection of a judicial decision made by an officer not invested with any judicial powers, differs very distinctly from the rejection of one made by persons expressly invested with such powers, and even with the right of final decision. It may have been unwise to create such a board as that which revised the Louisiana returns, but we very greatly doubt the right even of both Houses in joint-session and acting unanimously, to set aside its decisions. As to the rightfulness of those decisions, especially the exclusion of the vote of the parishes which were said to have been terrorized, everything, both of law and of justice, turns upon the question whether that charge was true or not. If it was true, the Board were not only authorized, but commanded to exclude the vote of those parishes; whether it was, is not so easily decided, as Mr. Lowell says, at this distance; but certainly the evidence presented before the Board creates a strong presumption of its truth. How far the

investigations, now making by the Committee of the two Houses of Congress, will establish or overthrow that presumption, remains to be seen.

THIS statement of the Republican case very naturally excites a certain distrust in an impartial mind. It may be asked very fairly upon how many "ifs" and "peradventures" the right of Mr. Hayes to the Presidency depends? And what opportunity there is for the fair election of a President of the United States, in the manner prescribed by the Constitution, when everything is made to turn upon the judicial fairness of a partisan Board in a single state, who have every political motive to patch up a case for their own side? And whether it is honest for a great party and its candidate to secure a political victory by raising a series of technical points, when the broad outlines of the case indicate their defeat?

This view of the case has a superficial plausibility about it, and it has even been urged by some among the less zealous supporters of Mr. Hayes. But it is exactly the reverse of the truth: Mr. Tilden's strength in the whole conflict has been technical and Mr. Hayes has been the true choice and representative of the American nation. We cannot hope to make this clear to the minds of those who believe that the American nation is the creation of a contract recorded in the Constitution; and that there are no laws of political life and power, save those which receive the sanctions of Conventions and Legislatures. The nation is a reality, which exists independently of any document constituting and defining its Government, although it will always naturally embody its leading political ideas in some written or traditional code of fundamental law. Its growth and development are determined by natural laws, which the Constitution may retard for a time, but can never in the long run hinder in their operation. And as the nation is an organic body, so these are its true organic laws. We had some experience of this during the Rebellion; the letter of the Constitution would have delivered us over to the enemies of the Union, but the nation fell back upon the higher and organic law of self-preservation, and bore the howls of the Constitutionolaters with considerable equanimity. Since that, the popular worship for the document has largely abated, not because the people have less faith in the organic unity and authority of the nation, but because they have come to

a semi-conscious apprehension of the fact that these rest on a far deeper foundation. Language was popularly used during the war, which was previously without parallel outside the Abolitionist camp; and the fine-spun distinctions by which legal interpreters sought "to stretch the old formula to cover the new fact" found no sort of general currency, because facts had become all at once more real than formulas.

Now one corollary of the law of self-preservation is this, that the people never forfeit the fruits of any great struggle through any submission to technicalities. When Col. Pride marched his soldiers to the door of the House of Commons on the 6th of December, 1648, it seemed as if no power in the land could prevent the restoration of Charles Stuart to the throne, and the re-establishment in another form of the spirit of Laud's regime. The supreme constitutional power of the land, that for the vindication of whose authority the war was begun, had declared their readiness to accept the King's terms; and this had been brought about by the blunders of the leaders of the Army in accepting the Self-denying Ordinance. But the rue nation of England and its truest representatives, its soldiers, took the step which saved English liberty, although the step was a stride across a thousand formulas and conventions.

In all essential respects, the present situation is a parallel to that of 1649. Mr. Tilden has received the votes of those who desire to reverse the policy of the war, to weaken and decentralize the national government, to restore the system of State Rights, and to remand the Southern negro to a position of virtual slavery, both political and industrial. Against his election every northern state that heartily supported the war, including all of New York except her disloyal metropolis, and excluding with New York City her two suburbs on the East and the West, have deposited their votes. The line of division runs exactly as it did in 1862-4; and the South has any suffrage to cast in the matter through the blunder of her reconstruction, a blunder made in the vain hope that the negro would have the political stamina necessary to make him the political balance of his former masters. The vote of the Republican party is the vote of what was during the war and is still in every sense but the technical one, the American nation. It is the vote of the states which have decreed and accepted our new political status, and whose ideas are embodied in those great amendments,

which are the best clauses in the whole document. It is the vote of those, who, in every country under heaven except our own, and in our own if we had not been led and ruled by doctrinaires, would alone elect the President and the Congress for a long period to come. And that the foolish restrictions upon this their natural right, the right of a victory whose real results have never been accepted by the defeated-will remain the permanent law of the land, is rendered improbable by all the historical experience of the civilized world.

This instinct it is, the conviction that the right and the power of the South and its allies are bare technicalities, which has united the great mass of the Republican party in supporting their leaders in contesting Mr. Tilden's election. They are fighting technicality with technicality, and they mean to fight it to the end. But let us not be misunderstood here; we are not speaking of definite plans for the future which have been formed either by the Republican party or its leaders. We are trying to discern and to describe the deeper currents of feeling which occupy the public mind, and which take shape in definite ideas and plans in the instant of a practical emergency. And such an emergency will have come when the Southern representatives and their Northern allies resist the inauguration of Mr. Hayes, if he be declared elected. Nor do we foresee any violent coups d'etat or revolutions, for none such will be needed. No State that was in the Rebellion has any security for its status inside the Union, except a law of Congress which is as liable to repeal as any other law; and the Southern representatives cannot refuse to recognize the regularly-inaugurated President of the United States, without giving the North the opportunity to repeal those laws.

THE fearful destruction of life by the burning of the Brooklyn theatre has caused a thrill of horror throughout the community, such as we have not experienced for many years. The loss of over three hundred lives, including that of an actor so well known and so widely esteemed as the younger Murdoch, the dreadful glimpses given us of the scenes of despair and death, the evidence of frightful mental and bodily suffering undergone by the victims, all conspire to prompt the demand for greater safeguards and more active precaution in connection with all our places of public resort. Most of our theatres seem to be little else than vast tinder-boxes,