of all the advantages that make peace a blessing. We
should have so much more territory, and so much less substantial
greatness. We did not enter upon war to open a new market, or fresh
fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to
save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a
fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our
business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a
purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as
wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other
conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength,
receive no detriment.

We would not be understood to mean that Congress should lay down in
advance a fixed rule not to be departed from to suit the circumstances
of special cases as they arise. What may do very well for Tennessee may
not be as good for South Carolina. Wise statesmanship does not so much
consist in the agreement of its forms with any abstract ideal, however
perfect, as in its adaptation to the wants of the governed and its
capacity of shaping itself to the demands of the time. It is not to be
judged by its intention, but by its results, and those will be
proportioned to its practical, and not its theoretic, excellence. The
Anglo-Saxon soundness of understanding has shown itself in nothing more
clearly than in allowing institutions to be formulated gradually by
custom, convenience, or necessity, and in preferring the practical
comfort of a system that works, to the French method of a scientific
machinery of perpetual motion, demonstrably perfect in all its parts,
and yet refusing to go. We do not wish to see scientific treatment,
however admirable, applied to the details of reconstruction, if that is
to be, as now seems probable, the next problem that is to try our
intelligence and firmness. But there are certain points, it seems to
us, on which it is important that public opinion should come to some
sort of understanding in advance.

The peace negotiations have been of service in demonstrating that it is
not any ill blood engendered by war, any diversity of interests
properly national, any supposed antagonism of race, but simply the
slaveholding class, that now stands between us and peace, as four years
ago it forced us into war. Precisely as the principle of Divine right
could make no lasting truce with the French Revolution, the Satanic
right of