and Newport were ever so exhilarating to him as Wall Street and State
Street, and he longs to be well enough to infest his whilom haunts.
Slavery is a self-limited disease, for it suffers nothing but itself to
impose its limits. In that sense the North would soon have his old crony
on the pavement again, with one yellow finger in his button-hole, and
another nervously playing at a trigger behind the back. For the North
was paying roundly in men and dollars to renew that pleasurable
intercourse, to get the dear old soul out again as little dilapidated as
possible, with as much of the old immunities and elasticities preserved
as an attack so violent would allow.

The President said to the deputation of Quakers, "Where the Constitution
cannot yet go, a proclamation cannot." This was accepted by a portion of
the North as another compact expression of Presidential wisdom. It was
the common sense, curtly and neatly put, upon which our armies waited,
and for whose cold and bleached utterances our glorious young men were
sent home from Washington by rail in coffins, red receipts of Slavery to
acknowledge Northern indecision. It was the kind of common sense which,
after every family-tomb has got its tenant, and wives, mothers, sisters
tears to be their bread and meat continually, would have jogged on
'Change snugly some fine morning arm in arm with the murderer of their
noble dead.

For, though neither the Constitution nor a proclamation can quite yet go
down practically into Slavery, Slavery might come up here to find the
Constitution in its old place at the Potomac ferry, and without a toll
or pike to heed.

It seemed so sensible to say, that, where one document cannot go,
another cannot! And yet it depends upon what is in the document. If the
Constitution _could_ go South now, it would be the last thing we should
want to send, at this stage of the national malady. It contains the
immunity out of which the malady has flamed. Its very neutrality is the
best protection which a conquered South could have, and a moral triumph
that would richly compensate it for a military defeat. Would it not have
been quite as sagacious, and equally aphoristic, if the President had
said, "Where a proclamation cannot go, the Constitution never can
again"? He has said it! And if the proclamation goes first, the
Constitution will follow to bless and to save.

Both of these little books of Mr. Conway are devoted to showing the
necessity for a pro