ANDREW JOHNSON.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 388, 25 June 1866, Page 1

ANDREW JOHNSON.

(From the Dally Telegraph.) The lesson on the proneness of mankind to build up large ideal fabrics from a foundation of half-a-dozen specimen bricks which are already in their possession, is enforced by our experience of the two remarkable individuals who at this moment preside over Ihe destinies of the United States and of France, No one is now ignorant that if the singular reserve silent power, which is the shstratum of Napoleon Ul.’s character and influence, had been known to be in his possession in 1848, his election as President of the French Republic would ;have been an impossibility. His supporters thought that in advancing him they were dealing with a lounger whose weakness made him harmless, and who would be valuable as possessing the magic name of Napoleon. But it was not long before they learnt Low little they knew with whom they were dealing. Kicking down the ladder by which he had mounted, Louis Napoleon at one bound made himself autocrat of France, and revealed himself to the astonished gaze of Europe as the most daring, far-sighted, ■ and comprehensive statesman whom with one mighty exception France has ever known. Similarly, if it had been foreseen that there was at the bottom of Andrew Johnson’s character the strength of will and iron inflexibility of purpose which hehaslatterly shown, it is needless to point out that he would never have filled the chair from which, upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, he leaped at one bound into a position that Kings and Kaisers might envy fur its splendor, while they trembled at its responsibilities. Bom in utter obscurity and humble poverty, deprived at ten years old of a father’s support, left with an aged mother dependant upon him, thrown upon his own resources in earliest childhood, ignorant of the alphabet until he reached his seventeenth year, unable to write till tutored by his wife, whom he married in his twentyfifth year, bound over as au apprentice to a tailor before he had acquired the rudiments of knowledge—Andrew Johnsbn affords another of those noble examples which are pregnant with encouragement to the humblest and poorest amongst us. Let there be in any boy an indomitable desire to learn, and neither poverty nor obscurity will avail to keep him back. Step by step Andrew Johnson has mounted, until at last he has reached a pinnacle for which, by the rough and masculine discipline of hardship and adversity, he has according to the mysterious shaping of Providence, been wonderfully fitted. Elected alderman of a little village in Tennessee, and afterwards Mayor of the same village, then sent as member to the State Legislature, successively appointed member of Congress to Washington, Governor of his own State and member of that once illustrious body the United States Senate, he was there made Vice-President to step thence into the Imperial chair of President of the United States; and in all these stages of career Andrew Johnson has shown us how, to men of his type, obstacles become stepping stones, and difficulties become assistances.

It is refreshing to compare the brawn and muscle of such a mind as Andrew Johnson’s with the effete and enervated scholasticism of a pedant like Charles Sumner. It is like breathing the fresh ocean breeze on Flamborough or Beechy Head, and comparing it with the sickly aroma of incense exhaled by an Italian Cathedral. Andrew Johnson has thought out his experiences from the teachings of life. Charles Sumner gains his statesmanship from the pages of Burke, and enforces his arguments, like Mr Lowe, by the logic of all the philosophers who have written on human politics. Nothing is more striking to men who are thoroughly familiar with American affairs than the ignorance manifested by the Southern politicans of the North, and Northern politicans of the South. Probably* .Charles Sumner was never in his life at Charleston, Mobile, or New Orleans ; and we know that Mr Calhouns only journeys were from South Carolina to Washington, and from Washington to South'Carolina. It is a happy circumstance for the future of the United States that the President to whom what in cur light language we call “ accident” baa entrusted the helm of State, Las a wider knowledge of his own country than

falls to the lot of many of hia brother politicians, We in England whose whole area, with Wales, Ireland, and Scotland added, might be set down in Virginia or Georgia without covering their surface, or, if placed in mighty Texas, would only be a speck in its centre, can form little conception of the dwarfiing effects which the immensity of America produces upon the minds of her statesmen. The representatives of icebound, manufacturing, granite-yielding New England come to Washington to enforce the legislation which their soil, their tern peraure, and the density of their population demand; nor does it ever occur to their memory that Florida, which stretches out her toe until it well-nigh touches the Tropic of Cancer—that Louisiana, and their fair semi-tropical sisters, are members of a common confederation with Massachusetts and Connecticut; or that the legislation at Washington should fit the huge dimensions of a country which, from north to south and from east to west, stretches over thousand of biles. By reason of the central situation of Tennessee, as at one a Border and a Western State, Andrew Johnson has been taught what are the just claims of the South and West, while his loyalty to the Union has inseparably identified him to the interests of the North. Born a Southern, Andrew Johnson made himself eminent among pro-slavery democrats, until he saw that slavery and union were no longer compatible. Preferring the integrity of the nation to the continuance of an institution which kept million! of men in bondage, he threw himself into the ranks of those democrats and fought his way to the top. Glorying in the many points of resemblance between himself and his great prototype, Andrew Jackson, he is as little likely to be guided and manipulated by soft and silky politicians as “ Old Hickory” in 1832. That the task which lies before him is vaster than any that has yet been entrusted to any living politician, we may gather even from the very latest inteiigence, which reports the ugly questions arising in Congress, and the complex intrigues of baffled factions, will not drive Andrew Johnson to seek in a foreign quarter immunity from Republican interference in his domestic policy, we hail the strength and tenacity of his character as omens of the happiest augury, not only for the Re-United States, but also for the whole family of man.