New York Daily Tribune

THE BLOCKADE AND THE BLOCKADERS OF THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.

It is now well assured that the Legislature has come to an informal end, and that the Governor, Secretary of State, Auditor, Treasurer, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Circuit and Supreme Judges, are left either to shut up shop and go about something to earn a living, or to proceed with their duties for two years without pay. The Constitution of our State never contemplated the latter alternative, and the officers are at perfect liberty to close their doors, go home and earn the pittance for their families which that economical instrument prescribes for them, in their several ways. The people have no claim on them after their salaries are withdrawn. But the evil does not stop here. A large amount of much-needed legislation is blocked for two years, unless the Governor shall call a special session, and two thirds of all the members respond to the call. We are not over stating the amount of business thus defeated when we place the number of bills of greater or less consequence which have never reached a final vote at fully three hundred.

The larger share of these were of local necessity, but their failure involves a general misfortune. Hardly a member, Republican or Democrat, has succeeded in getting half the measures intrusted to him by his constituents acted upon, and many have not a single evidence of their faithfulness to carry home to those who elected them.

The cause of this great public calamity need not be disguised. The leaders of the Democracy, in the tenacity of their hate against Judge Trumbull, squared the whole business of the session to stave through an oligarchical and swindling gerrymander of the State, by which they hoped to stifle the popular voice and elect a Pro-Slavery Senator in 1860. As justly and firmly declared in the veto message of Gov. Bissell: "I object to said bill, because its effect as a law would be to continue the control of the General Assembly in the hands of a minority of the people." In the blindness of their zeal these violators of popular rights could not frame a constitutional act. They placed the new County of Ford wholly within the IXth Senatorial District and also wholly within the XVIIIth Senatorial District. They also placed a town of "South-west Chicago" in a Senatorial and a Representative District, notwithstanding there is no such town or voting precinct created by law in the State. They made districts which stretched over two degrees of latitude. They made eleven thousand Pro-Slavery voters equal to twenty thousand Republican. They nullified the first principles of American freedom and equality-and all to gratify their spite against a true and fearless representative of the people in the Senate of the United States.

Having settled themselves upon the scheme of bald-faced public fraud, they resolved to make everything else, of little or great consequence, dependent on its fate. Having a majority in both Houses, they frittered away the forty two days contemplated by the Constitution as the limit of the session, in speech-making, buncombe resolutions, and Lecompton charters. On Saturday last one of their own men (Mr. Erwin of Schuyler), reported the regular appropriation bills from the regular Committee. Yet they fought it off all day, and declared that it should not be passed until the swindling and unconstitutional apportionment should become a law. They would starve the Governor into signing a bill violating not only the rights of the people but the Constitution itself. And not only so, but they would peril the administration of justice throughout the entire State for two years, unless the Republicans would remain and thus acquiesce in the villainy. In our whole history as a State there has not been another so outrageous and desperate an act attempted by a political party. The virulence of their hate and the fullness of their determination to force this measure down the throats of the people at all hazards, can be best understood in the decree which went forth consigning the private bills of Democratic members and Democratic constituencies to the same fate with the appropriations and the other important business before them, rather than fail of their single scheme.

Under these circumstances, business being at a standstill, having over stayed their time at their own expense longer than any previous Legislature since the adoption of the Constitution, the Republicans closed down upon tomfoolery and fraud at once, by leaving them without a quorum even to pass nigger-driving resolutions. We applaud the act, and we gladly accept the issue thus tendered for another appeal to the honest and intelligent electors of the State.

[Chicago Press and Tribune, Feb. 24.