more than a
truce favorable only to the weaker party in the struggle, to the very
criminals who forced it upon us. The single question is, Shall we have
peace by submission or by victory? General McClellan's election insures
the one, Mr. Lincoln's gives us our only chance of the other. It is
Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy; we must
conquer this to be at peace with them. With the relations of the
several States of the Rebel Confederacy to the Richmond government we
have nothing to do; but to say that, after being beaten as foreign
enemies, they are to resume their previous relations to our own
government as if nothing had happened, seems to us a manifest
absurdity. From whom would General McClellan, if elected under his plan
of conciliation, exact the penalties of rebellion? The States cannot be
punished, and the only merciful way in which we can reach the real
criminals is by that very policy of emancipation whose efficacy is
proved by the bitter opposition of all the allies of the Rebellion in
the North. This is a punishment which will not affect the independence
of individual States, which will improve the condition of the mass of
the Southern population, and which alone will remove the rock of
offence from the pathway of democratic institutions. So long as slavery
is left, there is antipathy between the two halves of the country, and
the recurrence of actual war will be only a question of time. It is the
nature of evil to be aggressive. Without moral force in itself, it is
driven, by the necessity of things, to seek material props. It cannot
make peace with truth, if it would. Good, on the other hand, is by its
very nature peaceful. Strong in itself, strong in the will of God and
the sympathy of man, its conquests are silent and beneficent as those
of summer, warming into life, and bringing to blossom and fruitage,
whatever is wholesome in men and the institutions of men.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1864-1865.

There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose
assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation
they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not
control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without
dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning
t