what is fit to be done; and if it be done wisely,
temperately, and firmly, it need appeal for its legality to no higher
test than success. It is the nation and not a section, which is
victorious, and it is only on principles of purely national advantage
that any permanent settlement can be based.

The South will come back to the Union intent on saving whatever
fragments it can from the wreck of the evil element in its social
structure, which it clings to with that servile constancy which men
often show for the vice that is making them its victims. If they must
lose slavery, they will make a shift to be comfortable on the best
substitute they can find in a system of caste. The question for a wise
government in such a case seems to us not to be, Have we the right to
interfere? but much rather, Have we the right to let them alone? If we
are entitled, as conquerors,--and it is only as such that we are so
entitled,--to stipulate for the abolition of slavery, what is there to
prevent our exacting further conditions no less essential to our safety
and the prosperity of the South? The national unity we have paid so
dearly for will turn out a pinchbeck counterfeit, without that sympathy
of interests and ideas, that unity of the people, which can spring only
from homogeneousness of institutions. The successive advances toward
justice which we made during the war, and which looked so difficult and
doubtful before they were made, the proclamation of freedom and the
arming of the blacks, seem now to have been measures of the simplest
expediency, as the highest always turns out to be the simplest when we
have the wit to try it. The heavens were to have come crashing down
after both those measures; yet the pillars of the universe not only
stood firm on their divinely laid foundations, but held us up also,
and, to the amazement of many, God did not frown on an experiment of
righteousness. People are not yet agreed whether these things were
constitutional; we believe, indeed, that the weight of legal opinion is
against them, but nevertheless events are tolerably unanimous that
without them we should have had a fine Constitution left on our hands
with no body politic for it to animate.

Laws of the wisest human device are, after all, but the sheath of the
sword of Power, which must not be allowed to rust in them till it
cannot be drawn swiftly in time of need. President Lincoln had many
scruples to overcome ere he could overstep the lim