The Murdered State

From the New York World. The recent popular convulsiona in the State of Louisiana have but opened to the public gaze one of the skeleton closets in which the Republican party has long vainly striven to hide the mangled and writhing body of a half-inurdered coniinonwealth. But tor this convulsive turning in her bloody shroud„the " Pelican State" might have been supposed entirely dead, alike by her assassins and by those who have mourned her liberticide. Drawing resol utiori froni despair, her people seem to have made this last frantic effort in the hope of proving that they still retain sorae sparks of civil life in their bloeding body politie, and perhaps in the hope of establishing some claim on the sympathy of the American people by couipelling their attention to the ghastly spoctacle on which they have so long closed their eyes in criminal apathy and ppareiit indilference. We shall doubtless be told that, intolerable aa aro the woes which have been heaped on this peeled and stricken people, they have only made their bed the harder by thia aquirming under the knives of the political ïhug who hold them by the throat. We do not at all question the accuracy of this statement, but when it is made, and when the mere imprudence of the late popular niovenient in Louisiana is fully conceded, it is but just to say that thia statement and this concession only serve to set in a still clearer light the enormity of the outrages to which the Radical party has set its hand and seal in this whoïe JLuuibiima business. Por the Radical party in the United States, under the lead of President Grant, and with the connivance of the dominant majority in Congreas, is just aa directly responsible for these acts of desperation committed by the people of Louisiana as for the original wrongs which left to them no avenues of public life unclosed except those which lead to popular insurrection. The long suffering with which these afflicted people have endured the overthrow of their civil rights and the spoliation of their property sufficiently proves that the late insurrection did not spring from any spirit of giddinesa or revolt against rightful authority. There was no rightful authority in Louisiana when the peoplo rose against their oppre8sors, for these oppressors were usurpers - known and ackuowledged to be such in the eyes of the nation. The crime of treason and of insubordination was made impossible by the political situation which, without their consent, had been created for the people of thia haple83 State. The only thing possible for them, in the extremity to which they have recently been reduced, was either to die and make no sign or else to show, however impotently and however imprudently, that they still had the sensibilities of ordinary men to whom life and property are dear. The rights of freemen had long since been taken from them by the reconstruction acta of the Radical party, and thia spoliation they endured, if not with equanimity, at least with patience. It is human nature and the most primary maxims of public and of private right which havo been insulted ia the persons of the Louisiana peoplo, aud the very imprudence of their recent demonstration only shows that human nature and the most primary instincts of public and private right will sometimos express themselves against the counsels of reason, for they have extorted from hese people the spasms which are uow ío be made the pretext for extinguishing the last sparks of civil liberty in a murdered State. Crime has a logic which is often as remorseless as that of gemometry. It was perhaps fitting that the crime committed against the State of Louisiana by the the usurping Kellogg, and to which a drunken Judge in Louisiana and the President of the United States at Washington made themselves accessories after the fact, should go on to its predetermined catastrophe, that the enormity of the original outrage may appear in its true iueaments to the American people. The Radical party has long been sowing the wind in the South aud leaving to the ruined people of that section to reap the whirlwind. As for President Grant, when he had once made himself a prompt and willing accomplice of Kellogg and Durell in the assassination of this State, ie had already stepped so far in a wrong direction that " should he wade no more, Returniug were as tedious as go o'er." The people of Louisiana are greatly to De commiserated in their forlorn and desperate condition ; but pitiable as that condition is, it is less pitiable than the attitude which President Grant ia now compelled to take in the face of the world, as, in obedience to the inexorable ogic of hia original sin against the Louisiana people, he is now doomed to iasten on them the handcuffa of Federal military law, that the thieves among whom they have fallen may strip them at their leiaure. To this complexion it bas come at last, and it was fitting that tiis true relations to this disreputable and wicked business should be brought home to hia own consciousnbss as well aa to the conaciousness of the whole people. He bent his back to bear the burden of Kellogg and Durell. It was fitting that be should eke out the poor remnant of his public life with a fatal curvature of the spino, resulting from the heavy load he was so willing to assume. Nor can the Radical majority in Congress escape their legitímate share of responsibility in thia deplorable breakdown of our political system. They are not, indeed, responsible for the initiative which President Grant took in giving hia sympathy and protection to the Kellogg usurpation, but a Radical majority of Congress first created the conditions out of which. this usurpation grew; and a Radical majority in Congresa has subsequently winked at it by tacitly aiding and abotting a wrong-doing which was too atrocious to be publicly assumed. They were willing to let the President stagger on under an infamy too great to be voluntarily aharod by themselves. And, lastly, we take leave to say that the entire people of the Northern States must bear their share in the crowning wrong which has come to put its oapatone on this pyramid of public and private iniquity. Thoy, too, have looked on with folded hands whilo their neighbor's house was entered by robbers. They have not much cared what befoll their brethren of white blood in Louisiana, but have reserved all their sympathy for " the loyal blackg." Many among us have exulted in the unparalleled calamities and humiliations to which the late insurgents have been subjected at tho hands of their mercenary oppressors. AU such people have made themselves aceomplicos with Kellogg and Durell and Casey and Longstreet and Grant in the murder of this fallen State. But for a depravod public sentiment at the North, these outrages at the South would be impossible. Robbery at New Orleans and compounding with robbery at Washington plant their roots in a vitiated political conscience, which has darkened the better judgment of the popular mind. When that brilliant journalist, the late John Hampden Pleasants, of Virginia ,yielding to the temper of his times, had risked his life in a duel, and fallen at the hand of ais antagonist, a vast ooncourse of syinpaïhizing friends assombled around his bier ;o do honor to his memory. The ofh'cia;ing clergyman on this occasion startled ais hearers from their propriety by opening his funeral discourse with theso significant words : " Hare lies our dead Tiend, and you are his murderers." The moral of this story admits of an easy application to the political villainies and crimes so long tolerated at the North, as committed uuder the auspices of the Éepublican party.