annels, by lessening
its means, and would not destroy the influence of the misgoverning
aristocracy. On the contrary, it would give them that prestige of
misfortune whose power over the sentiments of mankind is the moral of
the story of Stuarts and Bourbons and Bonapartes. Retribution they
should have, but let them have it in the only way worthy of a great
people to inflict. Let it come in a sense of their own folly and sin,
brought about by the magnanimity of their conquerors, by the return of
a more substantial prosperity born of the new order of things, so as to
convince, instead of alienating. We should remember that it is our
country which we have regained, and not merely a rebellious faction
which we have subdued.

Whether it would not be good policy for the general government to
assume all the wild lands in the rebellious States, and to devote the
proceeds of their sale to actual settlers to the payment of the
national debt, is worth consideration. Texas alone, on whose public
lands our assumption of her indebtedness gives us an equitable claim,
would suffice to secure our liabilities and to lighten our taxation,
and in all cases of land granted to freedmen no title should vest till
a fair price had been paid,--a principle no less essential to their
true interests than our own. That these people, who are to be the
peasantry of the future Southern States, should be made landholders, is
the main condition of a healthy regeneration of that part of the
country, and the one warranty of our rightful repossession of it. The
wealth that makes a nation really strong, and not merely rich, is the
opportunity for industry, intelligence, and well-being of its laboring
population. This is the real country of poor men, as the great majority
must always be. No glories of war or art, no luxurious refinement of
the few, can give them a sense of nationality where this is wanting. If
we free the slave without giving him a right in the soil, and the
inducement to industry which this offers, we reproduce only a more
specious form of all the old abuses. We leave all political power in
the hands of the wealthy landholders, where it was before. We leave the
poorer whites unemancipated, for we leave labor still at the mercy of
capital, and with its old stigma of degradation. Blind to the lessons
of all experience, we deliberately make the South what Ireland was when
Arthur Young travelled there, the country richest in the world by
nature