ts once
restored, the people, maddened by the thrall that had been put upon
them, would be very likely to vindicate these rights by
rehabilitating slavery. Every incentive of high pride and every
impulse of low spite would combine to urge this; and the National
Government would have no legitimate way of preventing it_.

'It will never do to try to give slavery its lasting quietus by
mere arbitrary force. To secure this we have got to rely in no
small measure upon reason. We must never forget that just as Force
is the natural ally of Slavery, just so Reason is the natural ally
of Freedom. _When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we
must give its reason a fair chance to assert itself_. Military
authority over each reclaimed State should last until the majority
of the people have made up their mind to resume, in good faith,
their old relations to the Government, and have had a fair
opportunity to canvass how that resumption shall best be
inaugurated. Of course the machinery of the State Government cannot
be given over to traitors; _but whenever there is sound reason to
believe that a fair loyal majority of the State want it, let them
have it--and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning
slavery. If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried
out, and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of
subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will
follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their
own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if
loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will. For slavery, after
having been crippled as it has been by the war, even if it could
live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is
already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and
bury it in their own way_.'

Compare, now, in the fair spirit of criticism, the beginning and the end
of this unstatesman-like editorial. Slavery, we are emphatically told,
is dying; first, because the presence of the war in its immediate
vicinity is killing it; and, secondly, because free discussion, excited
by the war and the presence of Northern influence incidental to the war,
is killing it--_therefore let us hasten to withdraw the military power,
and the causes of free discussion, where, for a century, it ha