The Executive departments.
On Thursday last, it will be recollected,
Mr. Johnson, of
Arkansas, introduced into the Senate a bill to limit and define the term of the
Secretary, or the principal officers of each Executive Department.
It provides that the term of office of the above named officers be the same as that of a member of the House of Representatives, and expire at the end of each session of Congress, but that the same officer or person may be renominated or appointed for a number of terms.
We have rarely had the fortune to come across a more objectionable proposition.
Mr. Johnson said, on submitting this bill, that its constitutionality was beyond question.
We doubt it exceedingly.
The Constitution divides the
Government into three grand departments — Legislative, Judicial, and Executive.
It confers upon each certain powers, necessary to the discharge of their several functions.
It gives to the
Executive the power of appointing the heads of departments, with the advice and consent of the Senate.
When thus appointed the
Secretary holds his office at the will of the
President, unless he be impeached and removed.
To alter that tenure is to violate the
Constitution in its spirit.
If it be desirable to alter it, why not begin by a resolution to amend the
Constitution?
We hold that our Government is already the countries that have had the folly to submit to them, and fill their places with Yankees.
There has been but one example in modern times of the policy so gravely insisted on by this Yankee General.
Yes, there have been two, exclusive of those offered by
Russia, who does not transport "beyond the seas," but merely exiles to
Siberia; and both of these were afforded by the only people on earth who have an interest in the promises of Scripture — the only people who have a right by prescription to the Kingdom of Heaven.
We mean, of course, the saints of the earth, to whom all the earth belongs — who act under a divine commission and a higher law, and cannot, therefore, be expected to obey any impulse so merely human as those of justice and humanity — who have already trampled their own Constitution in the dust, and are responsible only to the law of their own lusts.
The great expositor of their creed, and its most genuine representative,
Oliver Cromwell, set the first example in
Ireland, whither he conducted an expedition in 1648, and it was cruel and bloody enough to satisfy even Yankee thirst of blood.
His dispatch from
Drogheda, which he had just carried by storm, announces that "in the heat of the action I forbade my soldiers to spare any that were in arms in the town, and I think that night
they put to the sword about two thousand men." History tells us that these two thousand men were murdered in cold blood after they had ceased to resist — nay, that very many of them were citizens of the town, and had not been engaged in the battle at all. Men, women, and children were slaughtered promiscuously, and without remorse, by this
Puritan saint, who had received a commission to turn the earth into a hell, and who, entirely released from all obedience to earthly tribunals, obeyed only the "higher law." One fortress submitted without firing a gun, and the saint was satisfied, murdering all the officers and decimating the men. "Their officers," he writes, "were all
knocked on the head." Observe the beauty and force of the expression, borrowed from the shambles, where butchers are wont to "knock their victims on the head."--"and every
tenth man killed, and the rest
shipped for Barbadoes." "The soldiers in the other towers were all spared as to their lives only, as they were
shipped, likewise, to Barbadoes." "I believe," he adds, "all the friars were knocked on the head promiscuously, except two.
The one of whom was
Father Peter Taaf, brother to the
Lord Taat, whom our men took the next day and made an end of." The other was murdered finally, and infants and women out of number.
At Wextord three hundred of the latter, many of them carrying their children in their arms, fled to the great Cross of the
Market, vainly imagining that the sacred emblem of Christianity would protect them.
Their godly persecutors only shouted some sentence about hewing Agag to pieces, and murdered them and their babes, every one.
Standing up to his knees in the blood of these poor helpless creatures, the chosen man of God--the great ideal of
Puritan perfection — wrote to the Parliament describing these horrible murders "as righteous judgements of Heaven," "as to which it is right that
God shall have all the glory." Called over to
England to assist in the ceremony of trying and murdering Charles I., which happened in the last days of January, 1649, he returned immediately after that tragedy, and recommenced his terrific murders.
Ireland was literally a lake of blood, and a very large proportion of those who escaped with their lives were transported beyond the seas.
It is in the midst of scenes of blood almost as terrific as these that a Puritan scoundrel dare insult a committee of citizens rendered destitute and reduced to starvation by the thieves whom his rulers presume to call soldiers, by threatening to transport them beyond the seas!
We say threatening, for it is a threat, between the pronouncing and the execution of which nothing interposes but the "interest" of the
Yankee nation.
There cannot be a doubt that had the
Yankee Government the
power to execute this threat, it would be forthwith put into execution.
Did not these Yankee puritans, just a century ago, deport the whole people of
Acadia, and are their descendants any better than they were?
But there is a more modern example for the
Yankees, and one which they will be sure to imitate if we are ever so weak or so cowardly as to put it into their power.
We mean the example of
Russia.
Alexander II.
is at this moment sending thousands of unhappy Poles to
Siberia every week.
He is following closely in the footsteps of his father, and will, if he can, depopulate
Poland to fill it up with beastly Russians.
That is precisely what the
Yankee Government designs to do in the
South.
It means to deport all the white population, and supply its place with negroes, or, what is infinitely worse, with Yankees.
They have immense territories — deserts and prairies — which they would gladly fill up, but which are so uninviting as to forbid the idea of their ever being voluntarily settled.
To these deserts--thousands of miles off — will be sent the whole Southern population, should they succeed in conquering the country.
Thus our people see what they have to expect, and if they submit to it, it will be because they have not the manhood to stand by their liberties.
