he obligation of saving the national existence by the military
extinction of the rebellion, regardless of all other ends and aims. They
trade upon the popular reverence for the Constitution--that sense of its
sacredness which lies so deep in the heart of the North. They do it to
mislead the honest masses, whose hearts are mainly right, but whose
heads--some of them, but, thank God! not many now--are not so clear to
see the miserable fallacy of its application. They make it a text and
pretext for inveighing against the government, and so weakening its hold
on the popular confidence and support; for raising seditious outcries
against any restriction of the license to talk and print treason--what
they call tyrannical oppression of the freedom of speech and of the
press. They know perfectly well that not a thousandth part of the
toleration which traitorous talking and printing enjoy at the
North--through the extraordinary and amazing leniency of the
Government--is for one moment granted to Union sympathizers by rebel
authorities in the South. They never have a word to say against the way
in which loyalty to the Union is there crushed down by imprisonment,
banishment, confiscation, and hanging. They have never a word to say
against the brutal and fiendish atrocities of cruelty perpetrated there
upon all who are even suspected of Union sentiments. They reserve all
their indignation for the moderate repression which our Administration
has seen fit, in some cases, to apply to traitorous utterances. They
have even risen to the sublime impudence of denouncing it as a monstrous
outrage on the constitutional rights of Northern traitors, that our
Government has declined, in a few instances, to allow the United States
mail to be the agent for transporting and circulating treasonable
newspapers. I have quite lately been edified with the tone of lofty,
indignant scorn with which one of these papers--published in the city of
New-York--cries shame on the Government for refusing to be its carrier;
though no man knows better than the editor that a publication at the
South as much in sympathy with the Union as his is with the rebellion,
would not only not get carried in the rebel mails, but, before
twenty-four hours, would be suppressed, and its editor in prison, or
more probably hung, by the direction or with the approbation of the
rebel authorities; and in such a case, our New-York editor would not
have space for a line to chronicle the fac