-On the 19th ult. Mr. Johnson vetoed the Bill for
extending the Freedmen's Bureau in the Southern States, the most moderate of the Radical party's measures, and one even supported by the Conservative Radicals. His reasons are all democratic reasons, nor does he seriously affect to say that the present Freedmen's Bureau is adequate to its work of securing justice to the freed- men. The duty of protecting the negroes whom the law has set free, and of the murder of whom in open day in the South we have innumerable reports, he entirely ignores. He has " the strongest desire," he says, " to secure to the freedmen the full enjoyment of their freedom and their property,"—but no desire to take the means
requisite to effect this. He pleads that as President he represents the whole Union, the unrepresented as well as the represented States, —but it does not occur to him that he represents also the most unrepresented elements in the unrepresented States, namely, the negroes. He will not tax afresh States whose representatives are not allowed to discuss in Congress the Bill for an object they dislike, but he has no wish to secure that the States, if received, shall be really fully represented in Congreas,—black population as well as white. The veto is supported in the message with great calmness and dignity, but there is not in it a trace of any sense of justice wider than the old State-rights principle of the democratic party. The attempt to pass the Bill over the head of the President failed,— the majority of two-thirds not being secured in the Senate.
