issue has not been the life of the nation, but the
conflicting titles of this or that family to govern it. Many people
appear to consider civil war as merely a more earnest kind of political
contest, which leaves the relative position of the parties as they
would be after a Presidential election. But no treason was ever so
wicked as that of Davis and his fellow-conspirators, for it had no
apology of injury or even of disputed right, and it was aimed against
the fairest hope and promise of the world. They did not attempt to put
one king in place of another, but to dethrone human nature and discrown
the very manhood of the race. And in what respect does a civil war
differ from any other in the discretion which it leaves to the victor
of exacting indemnity for the past and security for the future? A
contest begun for such ends and maintained by such expedients as this
has been, is not to be concluded by merely crying _quits_ and shaking
hands. The slaveholding States chose to make themselves a foreign
people to us, and they must take the consequences. We surely cannot be
expected to take them back as if nothing had happened, as if victory
rendered us helpless to promote good or prevent evil, and took from us
all title to insist on the admission of the very principle for which we
have sacrificed so much. The war has established the unity of the
government, but no peace will be anything more than a pretence unless
it rest upon the unity of the nation, and that can only be secured by
making everywhere supreme the national idea that freedom is a right
inherent in man himself, and not a creature of the law, to be granted
to one class of men or withheld from it at the option of another.

What have we conquered? The Southern States? The Southern people? A
cessation of present war? Surely not these or any one of these merely.
The fruit of our victory, as it was always the object of our warfare,
is the everlasting validity of the theory of the Declaration of
Independence in these United States, and the obligation before God and
man to make it the rule of our practice. It was in that only that we
were stronger than our enemies, stronger than the public opinion of the
world; and it is from that alone that we derive our right of the
strongest, for it is wisdom, justice, and the manifest will of Him who
made of one blood all the nations of the earth. It were a childish view
of the matter to think this is a mere trial of strength or stru