for it deals with the mutual
repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed
with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits
of God's purposes toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find
nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.

There is another class of men who are honestly drawn toward the policy
of what we are fain, for want of a more definite name, to call the
Presidential Opposition party, by their approval of the lenient
measures which they suppose to be peculiar to it. But our objection to
the measures advocated by the Philadelphia Convention, so far as we can
trace any definite shape amid the dust-cloud of words, is, not they
would treat the Rebel States with moderation, but that they propose to
take them back on trust. We freely admit that we should have been
inclined to see more reasonableness in this course if we had not the
examples of Jamaica and New Orleans before our eyes; if we had not seen
both there and in other instances with which history supplies us, that
it is not safe to leave the settlement of such matters in the hands of
men who would be more than human if they had not the prejudices and the
resentments of caste. Here is just one of those cases of public concern
which call for the arbitrament of a cool and impartial third
party,--the very office expected of a popular government,--which should
as carefully abstain from meddling in matters that may be safely left
to be decided by natural laws as it should be prompt to interfere where
those laws would to the general detriment be inoperative. It should be
remembered that self-interest, though its requirements may seem plain
and imperative to an unprejudiced bystander, is something which men,
and even communities, are often ready to sacrifice at the bidding of
their passions, and of none so readily as their pride. As for the
attachment between master and slave, whose existence is sometimes
asseverated in the face of so many glaring facts to the contrary, and
on which we are asked to depend as something stronger than written law,
we have very little faith in it. The system of clanship in the Scottish
Highlands is the strongest case to which we can appeal in modern times
of a truly patriarchal social order. In that, the pride of the chief
was answered by the willing devotion of the sept, and the two were
bound together as closely as kindred blood, immemorial tradition, and
mutual depen