rd's meeting in New York,--in spite even of
the resolutions of Keokuk and the address of the "James Page Library
Company" of Philadelphia,--in spite, above all, of the perfect felicity
in which, if we may believe the Secretary of State, the President's
speech left the American people. The loyal men of the loyal States do
not intend that the war they carried on for great ends shall pass into
history as the bloodiest of all purposeless farces, beginning in an
ecstasy of public spirit and ending in an ignominious surrender of the
advantages of hard-won victory. They demand such guaranties, in the
shape of amendments to the Constitution, as shall insure security for
the future from such evils as have scourged them in the past; and these
guaranties they do not think have been yet obtained. They make this
demand in no spirit of rancorous hostility to the South, for they
require nothing which it is not for the permanent welfare of the South
to grant. They feel that, if a settlement is patched up on the
President's plan, it will leave Southern society a prey to most of the
influences which have so long been its curse, which have narrowed its
patriotism, checked its progress, vitiated its character, educated it in
disloyalty, and impelled it into war. They desire that a settlement
shall be effected which shall make the South republican, like the North,
homogeneous with it in institutions, as well as nominally united to it
under one government,--a settlement which shall annihilate the accursed
heresy of Secession by extinguishing the accursed prejudice of caste.

Such a settlement the people have not in the "President's plan." What
confidence, indeed, can they place in the professions of the cunning
Southern politicians who have taken the President captive, and used him
as an instrument while seeming to obey him as agents? There is something
to make us distrust the stability of the firmest and most upright
statesman in the spectacle of that remarkable conquest. Mr. Johnson,
when elected, appeared to represent the most violent radical ideas and
the most vindictive passions engendered by the war. He spoke as if the
blacks were to find in him a Moses, and the Rebels a Nemesis. It seemed
as if there could not be in the whole land a sufficient number of
sour-apple trees to furnish hanging accommodations for the possible
victims of his patriotic wrath. One almost feared that reconciliation
would be indefinitely postponed by the relentle