on any terms short of the utter extinction of their basis of
wealth and distinction, will be the return of an armed overseer to a
cowering mob of insubordinate slaves. The mere assertion of their
authority will be its instant acceptance, and the most abject submission
by the people. They will only have to demand reelection to the National
Congress, and to every place of power, to be reinstated in precisely
their old position, their arrogance and self-assertion only augmented by
their having met and survived every disaster short of the destruction of
the source of their superiority.

Already schemes to restore the old State governments are rife, in
respect to Louisiana, Mississippi, and other of the rebel States, now
again brought within our military lines. Let this be done upon the old
footing at an early day, for these States and for the others, which
under the hypothesis now under consideration, will soon be subjugated;
let the Emancipation Proclamation fall into desuetude; let the military
authority of our army officers be withdrawn, and there is nothing in the
character of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy, and no other power
on earth, to prevent their flocking in crowds and at the very first
general election back to Washington, reuniting their forces with the old
body of profligate political hacks at the North, and flaunting with
increased presumption and activity the pretensions of slavery to
dictate the whole policy of the land. In that event, a strong party,
more distinctively proslavery and Southern than ever before, will be
organized; more openly and shamelessly than ever devoted to the
destruction of the last remnant of American liberty. Of course there
will be a new reaction against the new usurpation. The conflict will be
renewed, beginning precisely where the first war began, with the only
exception that the issue will be then more distinctly understood, the
conflict more desperate, and the result more definitive.

It is of the utmost importance that the true nature of the case be
understood: that this war is no accident of the hour, no merely
political or national event even. It is a death struggle between two
antagonist civilizations; if indeed one of them can be called a
civilization, and not rather a conspiracy against the very idea of
civilization. Again, the men involved in that conspiracy are not
_hidalgos_, _ancien regime_, nor any of the proud aristocracies of the
old world, who, when beaten