o the letter; furnish to the most malignant
slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow
pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new
party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the
Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of
'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were
possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the
rattlesnake. The most imbittering and offensive thing that _can ever be
done_ to those men _is done_ the moment you pronounce the words of
freedom and human rights, in conjunction with each other, as if they
were the same thing. That done, every other measure grows mild. To
territorialize the whole South, and place a satrap over every parish and
county of it--saying no word for freedom--would be a gentle and
conciliating procedure compared with the most innocent utterance of a
mere sentiment in behalf of emancipation and the elevation of the negro
to the status of a man. Why, then, strain at a gnat when we have already
swallowed a camel? If we mean anything by Emancipation Proclamations,
the organization of negro troops, or even by our own inherent love of
liberty, nothing after that need ever be handled gingerly with the
South. Every recommendation to abstain from giving her offence is simply
a recommendation to recede, not only from our whole war policy now so
happily inaugurated, but to recede from every genuine and efficient
sentiment the Northern people may entertain, or ever have entertained,
in behalf of the distinctively American idea: the freedom and equality
before the law of all men.

_'If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out,'_
continues our editor, _'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'._

Now it is precisely this simple-minded and easy credence that everything
will go right if it be at once handed over to the management of the men
who may have been whi