uest, as a people, is, and is to be, the
conquest over our own prejudices; our highest attainment the readiness
to be just, and to act with the boldness and vigor which justice
requires.

Taking things as they now are, let us again try to penetrate the future,
or at least to sketch different alternatives of what may happen. Let us
then try to catch the spirit of each alternative, and so be prepared to
draw from the event such of good, and to guard against such of evil as
each may involve.

As a first alternative, we may now speedily conquer the South.
Insurrection may spring up in the South, against the insurrection there,
and in aid of our arms. New vigor and new fortune may attend our own
military operations; and our future military task may--somewhat contrary
to our expectations, we confess--prove easy, and its conclusion close at
hand. In that event, dangers of another kind, dangers already alluded to
as existing at the commencement of the war, and hardly less to be
apprehended now than then, hardly less, indeed, than the indefinite
continuance of war, threaten the future of our political horizon. We may
see in a few months' time the very men who are leading the armies and
the councils of the Southern confederacy again cracking the whip of
their sharp and arrogant logic about the ears of the men who had
conquered them in the field of battle; claiming to dictate every
political measure; forcing the mould of their thought upon every form of
opinion, and, by astute political combinations, wielding the destiny of
the nation in behalf of slavery and despotism, and against the principle
of freedom. Do not imagine for an instant that any considerations of
modesty or humiliation on the one hand, nor of haughtiness or pride on
the other, would stand in the way of the immediate participation of
those men in our affairs. Let there be no delusions either, with regard
to the ability of the same leading class of men to keep themselves in
the saddle at the South, through all political changes not involving the
absolute destruction of slavery, and the complete and consolidated
establishment of other institutions and habits of life among the people
at large;--the virtual creation, in fact, of a new and different
population, by the blending of our own Northern men and manners with the
feeble indigenous freedom-loving growth. The return of this dominant
class of cotton lords among the common masses of a Southern population
anywhere,