t rejected truth, nor because they have
created the opinion out of which the President gathers breath for his
glorious words. Mr. Conway would hardly claim more, we think, than to
have spoken frankly what the people felt, the same people which hailed
the early emancipationing instinct of General Fremont. We see the fine
sense of Mr. Emerson in his advice to hitch our wagon to a star, but
there must be a well-seasoned vehicle, with a cunning driver to thrust
his pin through the coupling, one not apt to jump out when the axles
begin to smoke.

At the first overt act of this great Rebellion, anti-slavery men
perceived the absurdity of resisting a symptom instead of attacking the
disease. They proclaimed the old-fashioned truth, that an eruption can
be rubbed back again into the system, not only without rubbing out
its cause, but at the greatest hazard to the system, which is loudly
announcing its difficulty in this cutaneous fashion. But Northern
politicians saw that the inflammatory blotches made the face of the
country ugly and repulsive: their costliest preparations have been well
rubbed in ever since, without even yet reducing the rebellious red;
on the contrary, it flamed out more vigorously than ever. Their old
practice was not abandoned, the medicines only were changed. The wash
of compromise was replaced by the bath of blood. And into that dreadful
color the tears and agony of a million souls have been distilled, as if
they would make a mixture powerful enough to draw out all our trouble
by the pores. The very skin of the Rebellion chafed and burned more
fiercely with all this quackery.

If Slavery is our disease, the Abolition of Slavery is our remedy. Our
bayonets only cupped and scored the patient, our war-measures in and out
of Congress only worked dynamically against other war-measures far more
dogged and desperate than our own. The sentence of Emancipation is the
specific whose operation will be vital, by effecting an alteration in
the system, and soon annihilating that condition of the blood which
feeds our fevers and rushes in disgusting blotches to the face. "No,"--a
Northern minority still says,--"every fever has its term; only watch
your self-limiting disease, keep the patient from getting too much hurt
during his delirium, and he will be on 'Change before long."

No doubt of that. He loves to be on 'Change; of all the places in the
country, out of his own patriarchal neighborhoods, not even Saratoga