we are driven out. In taking a half-way
position at first, we expose ourselves to all the disadvantage and
discouragement of seeming to fight on a retreat, and cut ourselves off
from our supplies. For the supplies of a party which is contending for
a clear principle, and not for its own immediate success, are always
drawn from the highest moral ground included in its lines. We are not
speaking here of abstractions or wire-drawn corollaries, but of those
plain ethical axioms which every man may apprehend, and which are so
closely involved in the question now before the country for decision.
We at least could lose nothing by letting the people know exactly what
we meant; for we meant nothing that could not claim the suffrage of
sincere democracy, of prudent statesmanship, or of jealousy for the
nation's honor and safety. That the Republican party should be broken
up is of comparatively little consequence; for it would be merged in
the stronger party of those who are resolved that no by-questions, no
fallacies of generosity to the vanquished, shall turn it aside from the
one fixed purpose it has at heart; that the war shall not have been in
vain; and that the Rebel States, when they return to the Union, shall
return to it as an addition of power, and under such terms as that they
_must_, and not merely _may_, be fixed there. Let us call things by
their right names, and keep clearly in view both the nature of the
thing vanquished and of the war in which we were victors. When men talk
of generosity toward a suppliant foe, they entirely forget what that
foe really was. To the people of the South no one thinks of being
unmerciful. But they were only the blind force wielded by our real
enemy,--an enemy, prophesy what smooth things you will, with whom we
can never be reconciled and whom it would be madness to spare. And this
enemy was not any body of kindred people, but that principle of evil
fatally repugnant to our institutions, which, flinging away the hilt of
its broken weapon, is now cheating itself with the hope that it can
forge a new one of the soft and treacherous metal of Northern
disloyalty. The war can in no respect be called a civil war, though
that was what the South, in its rash ignorance, threatened the North
with. It was as much a war between two different nations, and the
geographical line was as distinctly drawn between them, as in the late
war between North and South Germany. They had been living, it is true,